
Classl^S A- 75" 
Book A/ 4- . 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE MAKING 

OF 

THE BIBLE 



BY 

SAMUEL M. VERNON 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



V4- 



Copyright, 1916, by 
SAMUEL M. VERNON 





Zi 



P. 

MAR 25 1916 

©CI.A427s» 8 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The World Without a Bible. . 5 
II. A Bible Becomes Necessary. . 21 

III. Necessary Limitations to a 

Revelation 33 

IV. The Making of the Canon 49 

The Old Testament 

V. The Making op the Canon 

(Continued) 61 

The New Testament 
VI. The New Testament Becoming 

Holy Scripture 73 

VII. The Apocrypha 97 

VIII. The Present Standing of the 

Bible Ill 

IX. The Bible the Creature of 

Experience 124 

X. The Bible Tested by Experi- 
ence , 139 

XI. The Bible Amenable to Criti- 
cism 154 

XII. The Limitations of Criticism. 162 



CHAPTER I 

THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

The Bible was notjjiYen to man at the 
beginning of his career.. Only after the 
lapse of many centuries did it appear, as 
product and instrument of the growing life 
of the race. When it did come, it was not 
one sudden burst of light, but it crept in 
softly, little by little, as the mind of man 
slowly readjusted itself to its changing con- 
ditions and new method of receiving divine 
revelations. It was one of the later meth- 
ods chosen by God for manifesting himself 
to men. That religion of the highest order 
and ethical conduct of the finest quality 
were possible without the Bible was proven 
by the unanswerable argument that they 
existed and flourished through long periods 
and among different nations before there 
was a Bible. That a Bible was not given 
is sufficient evidence that it was not neces- 
sary to the well-being and religious devel- 
opment of the race in the beginning; God 
had other and adequate methods. 
5 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

If it had been best for man, God could 
have given him a written revelation at the 
first, a perfect guidebook for his conduct 
which he could not misunderstand. That 
he did not do it is proof that he considered 
another form of revelation more effective 
and better for man's religious development. 
The appeal must be more direct, and the 
personal contact closer and more manifest 
than would have been possible in a written 
revelation. Man's nature was untrained 
and undeveloped, and a powerful direct 
appeal was necessary to awaken a desire 
for the knowledge of God and for com- 
munion with him. 

If it is objected that writing was not in 
use at first, and, therefore, a written reve- 
lation was impossible, it may be answered 
that this is pure assumption. We do not 
know but that with the gift or develop- 
ment of language there was included a 
knowledge or development of the art of 
reading and writing. If that gift was not 
included in man's outfit for life, it could 
have been, and certainly would have been, 
if it had been necessary to his proper in- 
struction in religious knowledge and duties. 

6 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

Such a gift would have been no more 
miraculous than were the special direct 
revelations that were necessary from time 
to time because of the absence of a written 
code. It is the unchallenged fact of history 
that the Creator and Governor of all 
things, who had power to do whatsoever he 
saw to be needful to the well-being of man 
"for whom all creation stood," stopped 
short in his work without giving him a 
book of revelation. This must have been 
because he saw it would be better to use 
those methods of revelation which history 
has so fully justified and which our reason 
can see were better for the race in the 
early stages of its development than a 
written book could have been. How long 
that period was before the beginning of a 
written revelation is unknown. It was cer- 
tainly much longer than the traditional 
view, founded on the unscholarly chronol- 
ogy for which Archbishop Usher is largely 
responsible, makes it. Recent discoveries 
in archaeology, in the uncovering of the 
cities and monuments of antiquity, make 
it certain that that period must have been 
from four to eight thousand years, possibly 
7 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

longer, a period of sufficient length to jus- 
tify the statement that the Bible is com- 
paratively a modern development. 

During that long prebiblical period the 
word of the Lord was not wanting; it 
filled the earth, but in other forms than 
that in which we have it. Through all 
that time, as in every other period of 
human history, according to Saint Paul's 
argument on the subject, "God left not 
himself without witness/* nor ever could 
leave himself without a sufficient declara- 
tion of himself and of his will for the 
guidance of men in religious knowledge and 
duty. It is one of the illustrations of our 
perverse tendency to narrowness of thought 
in such matters that we are disposed to 
think that because the written revelation 
seems essential to us, it must have been so 
in that early age before the entanglements 
of history and our more complex life had 
arisen. But the conclusive evidence that 
such a revelation was not necessary is the 
fact that it was not given. It would cer- 
tainly be a defective administration of the 
world that would withhold at the be- 
ginning of history, when the race was 

8 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

forming character and determining its 
course, the ministries and agencies that 
would be most helpful to it in getting 
upon the right course. To suggest that 
he withheld anything that would have con- 
tributed increased knowledge or moral 
strength in that formative period of human 
life in the earth is to charge God with 
responsibility for those evils against which 
he inveighs so earnestly and to which he 
attributes the sufferings of this life. To 
that early period he gave such revelations 
as the conditions required, and such as 
would make the strongest appeal to man's 
nature and be most likely to receive a 
favorable response from him. 

The historical records give us but brief 
account of that early period, but what we 
have is very suggestive on the subject we 
are considering. There is an account of a 
man whose knowledge of God and whose 
love for him was so great that he was per- 
mitted to walk with God for three hundred 
years, if we accept the biblical account of 
patriarchal long life, and finally to go to 
live with him without passing through the 
shaded gateway of death. He lived before 

9 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

the time and without the aid of the Bible. 
There was another of whom it was said 
that he "walked with God/' whose char- 
acter was so good that he was selected out 
of the whole race as the one most worthy 
to be saved from the world-destroying flood 
and to be the new progenitor of the race. 
Noah lived and died without knowing even 
that there ever was to be a Bible. Methu- 
selah made his long pilgrimage without any 
written records to guide him, and yet seems 
to have been well-pleasing to God. The 
great father of the faithful who was called 
"the friend of God/' who stands at the 
head of the line of believing souls, and 
whose spiritual children all true believers 
are, than whom no better character has 
appeared in all the annals of history, even 
Abraham, who by simple goodness towers 
above and sheds a beneficent moral in- 
fluence over the ages, came from what we 
would call a pagan land, where there was 
neither Bible nor church. There was a 
way then of nourishing a soul in such 
beauty and richness of moral excellence 
that all Bible-taught and church-sheltered 
souls must still look to him as "the father 
10 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

of the faithful." In the outlook to the 
future which God gave Abraham nothing is 
said of a coming book or a rising church, 
but only of a "seed/ 5 in which all the 
earth should be blessed, and in which book 
and church lay implicit as parts of that 
blessing which all the world was to receive 
through the "seed/' which was Christ. 
The revelation he then had was adequate 
to the needs of such an exalted character, 
and it gave him a satisfying outlook to the 
future. 

Out of that great prehistoric period 
another remarkable specimen of its high 
religious characters dips for a moment into 
our atmosphere to give us a decided mental 
shock and to suggest that we have but 
little conception of the glories of that early 
period of splendid living when man walked 
and talked with God. All after times have 
been stirred with curiosity about the per- 
son, high religious offices, and priestly 
character of Melchisedec. The only con- 
tact he has with our modern life is through 
the single incident recorded in the four- 
teenth chapter of Genesis. He is here re- 
ported to have met Abraham on his return 
11 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

from the slaughter of the kings and to have 
accepted tithes from Abraham. The au- 
thor of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes 
up the incident and argues from it that 
Melchisedec must have been a greater reli- 
gious character than Abraham, for the 
payment of tithes to him by Abraham was 
an acknowledgment of his superiority. In 
developing his argument about the high- 
priesthood of Jesus Christ he says it was 
"after the order of Melchisedec." That 
seems to give him a religious and official 
standing above that of any of the great 
characters in the history of Israel. This 
suggests to us the possible riches in reli- 
gious character of that unreported, prehis- 
toric age that found ample religious 
instruction and guidance without a written 
revelation. Another pagan who does not 
rise quite so high in character, yet who 
gives evidence of being a real prophet of 
the Lord, is Baalam. While his religious 
character and career were not the best, 
they do show how widespread was the 
prophetic office and the religious teaching 
which it furnished. 

The structure of Bible teaching is such 
12 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

as to imply the existence of the conditions 
here outlined. Everywhere it is assumec 
that men know of the being of God anc 
are accustomed to the exercises of religionJ 

Nowhere is the hp ing of God flSfi^rt^H nr] 

argued. There is no attempt to prove that 
or the other great truths of religion. The 
first verse of the Bible assumes the whole 
case by simply saying, "In the beginning 
God created/ 5 without stopping to an- 
nounce, define, or prove the being of God. 
That was a well-known and generally ac- 
cepted fact. It had passed the need of 
any formal statement or proof. The same 
was true concerning the being and ac- 
tivity in human affairs of angels; they 
move out on the theater of action in human 
affairs as though they had long been known 
and their mission understood and needed 
no introduction at the late period when 
biblical writings began. 

If we consider the circumstances of man's 
early life on the planet, we can see that 
a highlj religious life might be maintained 
without a written revelation. He was 
created with such intellectual and spiritual 
powers as would naturally awaken aspira- 
13 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

tions and soul-hunger that would lead him 
to seek after God. Placed in the midst of 
the mechanism and active forces of the 
material universe, with the arching heavens 
above him and the smiling earth about him, 
his inquisitive mind would begin at once 
to ask how all this came to be and how it 
was maintained, and he never would rest 
till he had an answer to these questions. 
His spiritual aspirations, soul-longings, and 
consciousness of the powers and possibili- 
ties of his being would lead him out toward 
God. The human mind was constructed 
with reference to this environment, with 
powers and appetencies that when properly 
used would lead to the apprehension and 
knowledge of the truth. 

The watchmaker carefully studies the 
mechanism, the force needed to drive the 
machinery, the method of its application, 
the possibilities of repair and readjustment, 
and finally brings forth a creation that 
works out a given result with remarkable 
precision and continuity; it was made to 
attain that result. It may need much care, 
frequent windings, and occasional repairs, 
but all that is provided for and adapted to 
14 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

the intelligence that is supposed to use it. 
It was constructed with reference to its 
own powers and the capabilities of those 
who were to have the care of it. We cannot 
think that God was less thoughtful for man 
when forming him with his complex nature 
of body, soul, and spirit to run a course of 
development and broadening activities 
through the centuries. He must have 
carefully computed the force of animal 
appetites and propensities, of such mental 
endowments as reason, imagination, and 
will, and of the equipment of the soul with 
the gift of conscience, spiritual aspirations, 
and hunger for God, intending to keep 
himself in close, helpful, and directing re- 
lations to him. Had not some evil influence 
come in from without, like a grain of sand 
thrown into the mechanism of a watch, no 
doubt man would have run his course as 
faithfully as any timepiece ever made by 
man's less skillful art. Notwithstanding 
the perverting and corrupting influence of 
the evil that entered the race by sin, we 
must believe that through all those pre- 
biblical ages the phenomena of the natural 
universe, and the activities, aspirations, 
15 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

and impulses of the mind of man, aided 
and guided by the revelations given to 
him, were sufficient to lead him to the 
knowledge of all necessary truth. 

The visitations of angels seems to have 
served the race, as written revelations have 
served it in the later centuries, for impart- 
ing truth and spiritual inspiration. The 
very first step from Eden out into the 
thorn-producing world was under the di- 
rection of one of the seraphim with a drawn 
sword to give suggestion of a punitive ad- 
ministration of government henceforth, 
with what verbal instruction we are not 
informed. Angels appeared to Hagar in 
the wilderness, to Abraham under the 
Oaks of Mamre, where they revealed the 
doom of Sodom and lifted the veil of the 
future from the coming glories of his fam- 
ily. They appeared to Lot in Sodom, they 
came to carry Elijah home, and they stood 
guard about Elisha when menaced by a 
great army. In all the great events of 
Bible history prior to the completion of the 
written revelation angels had an impor- 
tant part in revealing, counseling, and 
directing. As a method of revelation it 
16 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

was most impressive and had immediate 
effect. 

In many cases God himself seems to 
have spoken directly to men, concealing 
himself, but declaring his purpose and his 
person. Thus he spoke to Noah concern- 
ing the Flood, giving him directions for 
building the ark, for collecting within it 
the living creatures, and his purpose of 
cleansing the earth by means of the Deluge. 
He spoke directly to Moses out of the 
burning bush, giving directions for his 
visits to Pharaoh, at various times in the 
journey toward Canaan, and in the closing 
scenes of his life. How frequent, and in 
how many different parts of the earth, these 
personal revelations may have been in that 
prebiblical period we have no means of 
knowing. They reached Abraham in Meso- 
potamia before there was any chosen fam- 
ily or redemptive race, while he belonged 
to what we would now call a pagan people. 
Such revelations reached Melchisedec, 
Baalam, and others. If they were made at 
all, that is proof that they were possible 
and expedient, and that the> would be 
made as often as the needs of the race 
17 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

required. One such direct communication 
from God would be repeated by men over 
wide districts and would have a permanent 
and potent influence. 

In addition to these methods of convey- 
ing truth to men, tradition must have been 
a very important means of disseminating 
and preserving the knowledge of God. The 
long life of the antediluvians, free from the 
excitements and business activity of mod- 
ern life, was favorable to the correct 
transmission of truth by tradition. Methu- 
selah was the contemporary of Adam and 
Noah, if we accept the Bible account of 
his long life, so that Noah might hear from 
the lips of Methuselah what was told him 
by Adam, so that the stories of creation 
and of the garden of Eden passed through 
but one person to reach Noah. The won- 
derful character of the events, and of the 
divine manifestations in connection with 
them, would insure a deep and lasting im- 
pression on the minds of those participating 
in them and great care in reporting them. 

After the beginning of Hebrew history 
God appealed to and seems to have de- 
pended upon this method of disseminating 
18 



THE WORLD WITHOUT A BIBLE 

and perpetuating the truth. He com- 
manded parents to diligently teach the 
facts of their miraculous history to their 
children: "And thou shalt teach them dili- 
gently to thy children, and shalt talk of 
them when thou sittest in thine house, and 
when thou walkest by the way, and when 
thou liest down, and when thou risest up." 
The accuracy and reliability of the human 
memory when it is fully trusted and 
charged with the responsibility of pre- 
serving important truth cannot be 
doubted. Before we had spoiled our 
memories by distrusting them and making 
written records of facts that once would 
have been committed to their safekeeping 
great feats of memory were very common. 
Conspicuous among these, to mention but 
one case, was the fact that blind Homer 
went from city to city in Greece reciting 
to wondering crowds the matchless periods 
of his immortal epic. 

With all these different methods em- 
ployed for the instruction of men there 
must have come to them very clear and 
convincing declarations of truth on all 
important subjects. Our knowledge of the 
19 



THE MAKING OP THE BIBLE 

character and purposes of God, as well as 
the few glimpses given us of the wonderful 
religious characters of prebiblical times, 
seem to warrant the conclusion that there 
were ample revelations of truth in forms 
more effective than written documents 
would have been. 



20 



CHAPTER II 

A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 

The changing conditions of the world 
made a change of method in dealing with 
it necessary. When the race had grown 
out of its primitive state, its larger intel- 
ligence and broadening fields of action and 
its more complex life made necessary a 
fuller revelation with better ordered and 
more enduring institutions to conserve its 
religious life. Nations were multiplying, 
complicated conditions were arising, racial 
forces were moving more vigorously, a 
keener mental analysis and a more search- 
ing philosophy were dealing with the ques- 
tions of life and being that were forever 
pressing for solution, and a clearer, fuller 
revelation of truth was required to meet 
the growing needs of the race. Historical 
facts were liable to become distorted and 
corrupted by being carried too long in the 
rather loose form of tradition. Moral and 
doctrinal teachings would be more uniform 
and less liable to perversion if they were 
21 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

committed to a changeless form in written 
documents. 

There was, however, a yet greater and 
more pressing need for a written form of 
revelation. There was to be introduced a 
complex and supernatural redemptive sys- 
tem that would require careful and elab- 
orate statement with luminous expositions 
easily accessible. The great moral duties 
and the essential elements of religion might 
be sufficiently made known by the voice of 
conscience, the light of nature, and the 
special revelations that God gave to men; 
but the entrance of Deity into a human 
body and life, the sacrificial and atoning 
death of that divine-human Person, the 
possible entrance of the divine into every 
human life with regenerating and sancti- 
fying power, and the cooperation in this of 
three divine Persons in the unity of the 
Godhead, of whom hitherto there had been 
no clear revelation — all this would seem to 
require a definite and full written state- 
ment, that there might be a proper appre- 
hension and clear understanding of these 
great truths. 

Great preparations were made to give 
22 



A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 

this revelation a proper setting and a po- 
sition of strength for its appeal to the 
human mind. A special family was set 
apart to project a new nation of people 
into the stream of history, consecrated to 
a high and peculiar mission, to embody and 
express in its own history and national de- 
velopment the great idea of redemption in 
a succession of educating events and insti- 
tutions leading up to the manifestation 
from its own national line of the great 
Redeemer, the God-man. Such was to be 
the dignity of his person and the glory of 
his work that there should be centuries 
of heraldry going before — incidents, cove- 
nants, institutions, and prophetic declara- 
tions, which when he should appear would 
be found to have been a declaration of the 
fact and character of his Messiahship. 
That long line of history was to clear a 
highway for the coming of the Son of God, 
into the very structure of which would be 
wrought evidences and proofs of his Mes- 
siahship, of its character and purpose, to 
which he w T ould perfectly answer in his 
career of teaching, suffering, and death, 
giving proof of him that could not be re- 
23 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

sisted by the unprejudiced mind. This 
race of people was segregated from the 
rest of the world, shut up to the culture 
and guardianship of its great idea which 
was the center of its life and the reason 
for its being, and to hold the deposit of 
truth given to it which it was uncon- 
sciously to expound and confirm in its 
history. There was to be little commerce 
or commingling with other nations, lest 
the purity and sacredness of this deposit 
should be corrupted. This is the teaching 
of Saint Paul, when he asks, "What ad- 
vantage then hath the Jew? or what 
profit is there of circumcision?" He an- 
swers his own question by saying, "Much 
every way : chiefly, because that unto them 
were committed the oracles of God," that 
is, the spoken and written revelation, the 
institutions and the ceremonies of religion, 
prefiguring and announcing the coming 
Messiah. This is the fact of history, that 
while the revelation was being made, and 
until it reached its culmination in the 
manifested person of Him who was its life 
and soul, and for the declaration of whom 
it was given — while this process was going 
24 



A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 

on, the people within whom it was coming 
to manifestation were sheltered by the 
divine covenant and guardianship in a 
separate and sacred position where no 
enemy could destroy them nor thwart the 
purpose of God till it came to glorious 
realization. 

This throws a flood of light on God's 
constancy in caring for fickle, backsliding 
Israel. How he could have borne with 
them in their lapses, rebellions, and apos- 
tasies, holding to them as his peculiar 
people, bringing them back from their cap- 
tivities, and reestablishing them in Jerusa- 
lem, appears only when we remember that 
he had selected them as the organ and 
instrument for manifesting his Son to the 
world. He could not change in the midst 
of the process from one people to another 
when the line of evidences and of revela- 
tion was half finished, but must continue 
to use a poor instrument till the work for 
which it was taken in hand was finished, 
especially as the identity of the instrument 
was the voucher for the integrity of the 
work. When the work was done and 
Messiah had been manifested to the 
25 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

world, Israel had completed its divinely 
appointed mission of preparing the way 
for the coming of Messiah. There have 
been no divine interpositions to bring 
them back to Jerusalem since Messiah was 
revealed. 

This fundamental purpose in the calling 
of Israel is made clear in the terms of the 
instituting covenant with Abraham. God 
promised Abraham that he should have a 
numerous progeny, "as the stars of heaven 
for multitude/ 5 and that in his "seed all 
nations should be blessed/ 5 Saint Paul 
calls attention to the fact that the singular 
number is here used, and that the term 
"seed" refers to Christ, "He saith not, 
And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, 
And to thy seed, which is Christ. 55 The 
whole redemptive scheme, therefore, lay 
implicit in that covenant with Abraham. 
That was the root idea, the formative 
germ of the whole Hebrew history and 
polity, their only reason for being, their 
justification and explanation. 

This new epoch in world development and 
race culture in religious knowledge and life 
made new agencies and methods necessary. 
26 



A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 

The proposition that God should actually 
come down among men and become in- 
corporated into the life of the race by 
taking on himself a human body, being born 
of a woman that he might redeem and sanc- 
tify the whole body of humanity, was a 
scheme so vast that it would justify two 
thousand years of educational preparation 
and notification, and the introduction of a 
more permanent and adequate method for 
announcing and expounding the facts of 
this great redemptive movement in written 
records, such as we have in the Bible. The 
Holy Scriptures were one element in the 
development of the holy "seed" that was 
to be a blessing to "all nations/' If not 
the greatest, these writings are one of the 
richest blessings that have come to the 
nations out of that covenant with Abra- 
ham. As soon as the great redemptive 
idea kindled the intelligence of man with 
larger and brighter thoughts about God 
and concerning his own being and destiny, 
the impulse to record, expound, and 
prophesy must have come into the soul 
of man as an impelling inspiration. This 
lifted the ethical and spiritual nature of 
27 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

man above the domain of nature and 
natural suggestion could no longer minister 
adequately to these higher reaches of life; 
the divine life coming into fellowship and 
alliance with the life of man made necessary 
the incoming of divine truth in larger 
measure than nature could give. Special 
divine revelations would no longer be ade- 
quate, for the broader fields of knowledge 
now opening to the minds of men and the 
larger development of the nations would 
invite and insure careful scrutiny and 
earnest discussion that could not be suc- 
cessfully conducted without written docu- 
ments that could be compared with each 
other and with known facts. This won- 
derful system of redemption, that burst 
forth like a new dawn on the world's 
growing intelligence, would require ample 
statement and exposition in forms that 
could be pondered and studied. Nature is 
quite silent here. She has no voice pitched 
to the key of redemption; her register does 
not include the high notes of redeeming 
love. Even an angel's jubilant song is not 
sufficient unless it can be recorded, so that 
the mind of man may turn to it often when 
28 



A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 

nature seems dry and empty. The high 
and transcendental are so woven in with 
the low and natural that we should be 
whelmed in endless confusion and per- 
plexity if we had not "a more sure word 
of prophecy, whereunto we do well that 
we take heed/ 5 that is ever accessible for 
our enlightenment and instruction. The 
work of redemption makes a personal ap- 
peal and contemplates a personal life unto 
holiness that makes necessary a daily coun- 
selor in righteousness and truth such as 
the Bible is. The noble living, the world- 
girdling service, and the missionary efforts 
of the Christian men of this age would 
not be possible but for the instruction 
and inspiration that come out of the 
book. 

Yet it is a most delicate thing to give 
such a revelation as is here supposed, for 
rules of safety themselves create great 
danger by leading to overmuch confidence 
in them when conditions arise to which 
they do not apply, and by disarming that 
watchfulness and care which are the best 
guarantees of safety. If the Bible had 
been intended to be a guidebook in the 
29 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

sense that it would tell us just what to do 
— how often to pray, how often to fast, 
how much to give, with all the other de- 
tails of a good life — it could all have been 
done plainly, so that there could have 
been no mistake, in a document not 
larger than one of Saint Paul's epistles, 
but it would have been a false leading, a 
betrayal of humanity in its most sacred 
interests. Humanity would have rotted in 
moral decay and spiritual death under 
such a system. The revelation must be 
in such a form as respects and preserves 
man's freedom, and develops his sense of 
responsibility for seeking, finding, and in- 
terpreting the truth, and for applying 
general principles to individual acts. It 
is necessary for man's spiritual and intel- 
lectual development to place the truth, as 
God has placed the gold, the grains, and 
the fruits of the earth, where we must 
search and dig to get it. Hence revelation 
comes to us, like the narrow veins of gold 
that run high up over the crest of the 
mountains and can be reached only by 
hard climbing and keen-eyed vision, tucked 
away in scraps of history, bits of poetry, 
30 



A BIBLE BECOMES NECESSARY 

sparkling proverbs, thrilling dramas, deep- 
toned, far-sounding prophecies, fascinating 
love stories, charming epistolary letters to 
friends, and world-embracing apocalyptic 
visions. 

That written revelation synchronizes 
with the history of redemption, that it 
was part of its machinery and equipment, 
and that its great necessity rose out of it, 
appears not only in the fact that it began 
under Moses, who first gave the redemp- 
tive movement organized form, that its 
writers were limited to the redemptive peo- 
ple, and that redemption both of Israel 
and of the world was its distinguishing and 
predominant theme, but also by the fact 
that the volume of written revelation closed 
with the recording and exposition of the 
events connected with the culmination of 
that history of redemption in the life, 
death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. When redemption was completed, 
written revelation was finished. 

The maledictions pronounced upon any- 
one who should presume to add anything 
to what had been written in the time of 
the apostles seems also to confirm this 
31 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

view of the interdependence of written 
revelation and developing redemption. 
The book is the herald and the witness of 
the Son, the God-man. 



32 



CHAPTER III 

NECESSARY LIMITATIONS TO A 
REVELATION 

So long as it was possible for man to 
dig out the truth as it lay buried in the 
facts of nature and of his own being, or 
to find it by lifting up his soul to God, it 
was better for him that he should be left 
without a written revelation. Nothing 
contributes more to man's development 
than searching for the truth, keeping him- 
self in the love of the truth that he may 
find it, and holding himself en rapport 
with his environment and with God, that 
he may discover and know the truth. The 
search for it in an educational and dis- 
ciplinary way is almost of equal value to 
its possession. The fact that God did not 
give man a written revelation till so many 
centuries after his appearance on the earth 
is the most conclusive evidence that it 
was not best for him to have it. We 
cannot sound the depths of the divine 
plans, yet there are apparent many rea- 
33 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

sons why it was better for man to be led 
into the temple of truth by the diligence 
of his own effort and the fidelity of his 
spirit in the search for it. 

Help that is not necessary is a hindrance. 
We make people paupers, destroy their 
self-respect, and deny them the develop- 
ment that is attained only by effort by 
giving them help when they could and 
should help themselves. Many teachers 
dwarf instead of developing the minds 
of their pupils by solving the hard prob- 
lems for them and lifting them over 
heights where they should develop their 
muscles by climbing. Many parents keep 
their children babies forever by satisfying 
all their needs and shielding them from the 
toil and struggle that makes strong men. 
That toiling boy whom you pity for the 
hardness of his lot will some day live in a 
palace which he has earned, while your pam- 
pered son will be spending on a worthless 
life money that he did not earn. The race 
would never have grown out of its infancy 
if God had given to man a full revelation of 
the truth at the first. He left man to find 
out the boundaries of the continents and 
34 



LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

the seas, and to discover the spherical form 
of the earth and the forces of nature by 
exploration and scientific study. He waited 
for man to discover steam power and elec- 
tricity because it ministered to human de- 
velopment to wrestle with the problems of 
creation, to track the forces of nature to 
their hiding places and devise a method 
for bringing them forth and harnessing 
them to the machinery of life for manu- 
facture and transportation. It is an af- 
fecting spectacle to see man footsore and 
weary trudging over the mountains, bearing 
his heavy burdens on his shoulders, while 
in his own home puffing steam was trying 
to make itself articulate in its crude lan- 
guage to tell him that it was there to do 
his work and to run his errands for him. 
But still he preferred to work his muscle 
and let his brain lie dormant in a stupor 
that to us seems incredible. God would 
not tell him the truth he ought to discern 
for himself. Electricity kindled its bon- 
fires in the sky at night to notify him it 
was there; it ran about the heavens in 
zigzag fire to show its speed of movement; 
it shook the earth with its thunder peals 
35 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

to suggest its power; it smote men dead 
and threw their charred corpses across the 
path of industry in its appeal to them to 
awake and call it into their service; and 
still they only cringed with fear and whined 
about the hardness of their lot. God would 
not tell them if they were so stupid as not 
to read these indications. He waited that 
man might have the benefit of thinking, 
the growing confidence of conquest, and 
the enlarging self-respect of achievement. 
Discovery was better than revelation. It 
holds true in the moral and spiritual realm 
also. It is better for men to seek the truth, 
to inquire and pray for it, to long for it; 
then when they find it they have already 
risen to a state of mind to make a wise 
use of it. 

It is quite impossible for men to under- 
stand and appreciate the truth unless they 
have this spirit of inquiry and the disposi- 
tion to search for it. This principle was 
clearly announced to Isaiah when he re- 
ceived his commission as a prophet, and it 
is quoted by Jesus as an explanation of 
the dullness of the Jews in understanding 
his parables. When Isaiah had his won- 
36 






LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

derful temple vision, it was said to him, 
after lie had offered himself for a messenger 
of the Lord, "Go and tell this people, 
Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and 
see ye indeed, but perceive not." Jesus 
teaches that he used parables for this very 
purpose of concealing the truth from those 
who did not love it and long for it, lest 
they would insult it and trample it under 
their feet. The same principle was illus- 
trated in our Lord's refusal to gratify the 
curiosity of the Pharisees by working a 
miracle to be seen of them, as they would 
look on any trick of legerdemain. It is a 
profanation of the truth to handle it 
lightly, to treat it irreverently; therefore 
it is placed where it can be reached only 
by sincerity, effort, and honesty of pur- 
pose. It is not flung out heedlessly like 
pearls before swine, lest they trample it 
under their feet, not knowing or caring 
what it is, and then turn about to destroy 
the very agencies that gave it to them. 
Like all of God's gifts, truth is so placed that 
we must seek it if we would find it, and 
we must love it if we would understand it. 
We must dig in the soil to get God's gift 
37 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

of bread, blast the quartz to get his gift of 
gold, and so must we break off the shell 
that enfolds the kernel of the truth if we 
would possess it. There is this hiding of 
the truth in the very form of its revela- 
tion to protect it from too familiar hand- 
ling by irreverent and unsympathetic 
minds. "Clouds and darkness are round 
about him/ 5 and he hideth even his truth 
wondrously from the eyes of the curious 
and the proud. This limitation is put 
upon the whole system of revelation, even 
upon the grandest expression of it in the 
person of our Lord, "God manifested in 
the flesh." The truth was so hidden under 
forms of flesh and common life that 
carnal men could not see it, nor could they 
discern the fineness of his spirit nor under- 
stand the meaning of his simple words. 
They misjudged him because they hated 
him, while the Simeons and the Annas 
recognized and hailed him with joy as the 
Messiah. It was the divine wisdom ex- 
pressing itself according to this uniform 
principle, to put the truth in its highest 
expression in a form to be recognized only 
by the lovers of truth. Others said, "He 
38 



LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

hath a devil, why hear ye him?" This 
they said because the spirit of the devil 
was in them, and, according to our prin- 
ciple, they could see only what was in 
themselves. We often complain that reve- 
lation is not more clear, that God does not 
disclose himself more positively in the 
moral conflicts of life, that truth is not 
put beyond the possibility of cavil, but 
the interests of truth itself and of the souls 
of men are served by thus placing it so 
that we come to know it only as we rise 
to the spirit that would make a proper 
use of it, and not turn its possession to 
evil account. 

It is well to reflect also that there are 
many things that we cannot know fully 
in our present state without spoiling the 
beauty and symmetry of our earthly lives. 
We could not know all the glories of the 
heavenly life without unhinging our work- 
ing force here, and destroying our appre- 
ciation and interest in things of the 
present life. It is much better for our 
earthly lives that "we know in part," that 
we should have but a dim outline of the 
future world, till our work in this world 
39 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

is done. It is also better for our moral 
development, for it is hardly possible that 
purely moral considerations could have a 
fair field if there were revelations of future 
conditions that would practically coerce 
the mind. The mind must be kept free 
from overpowering constraints, or from 
revelations that would practically leave 
us no option; the highest moral action 
requires absolute freedom. We never 
get a fair test of a child's obedience 
while we stand over it with a rod in 
our hands. 

Thus also the sanctity and dignity of 
the truth are maintained by putting it 
beyond the reach of profane and captious 
minds. It is placed in such relations to us 
as to give us intimations of its existence, 
of its character, and of the method of ap- 
proach to it, but we can really possess it 
only by loving it, working for it, and exer- 
cising sincerity and honesty of purpose 
toward it. It is plainly declared by Saint 
Paul that the higher truths cannot be 
known by the carnal mind. He says, "But 
the natural man receiveth not the things of 
the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness 
40 



LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

unto him: neither can he know them, for 
they are spiritually discerned." We must 
rise to their level before we can know 
them, and have hearts worthy of them 
before they will take up their abode 
within us. The truth seeks its level as 
water does, and is sure to find it. It is 
therefore natural that as men rise in moral 
elevation and spirituality their knowledge 
of truth broadens and becomes more satis- 
fying. There are inner chambers of truth 
to be entered only by those who have 
proven themselves worthy of it by their 
fidelity to the more primary revelations. 
The truth is of value only to those who will 
use it properly, therefore it is revealed in 
such forms as to become accessible only to 
those who have the spirit to make such 
use of it. We often wonder why revelation 
is not plainer, why we must read so much 
history, biography, poetry, parables, and 
epistles to get at it; and even then much of 
it is vague, involved, and hard to be under- 
stood. This is the honey in the rock which 
no man can get without climbing for it; 
and he will not climb for it unless he really 
desires it. There is a sacred trinity of 
41 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

revelation, holding the truth in triple form 
before the mind of man — in nature, in 
man's mysterious being and life, and in 
the Word. The Word made flesh and the 
Word made fact, or expressing fact, were 
both from the same source and are closely 
related in nature and office. A veil of 
flesh and of form in the putting is thrown 
over both, that their sanctity may appear 
only to those who are prepared in spirit 
to do them reverence. The audience cham- 
ber of the King is thus protected from 
rude and irreverent intrusion. Such jealous 
regard for the sanctity of the truth on the 
part of its Author only enhances its value 
in the eyes of men and intensifies their 
desire and search for it. 

This is one of the glories of revelation, 
one of the proofs of its genuineness, that 
it is thus limited and held in reserve. Just 
enough is given to show man his duty in 
plain speech that cannot be misunderstood 
and to excite his interest to learn more if 
he is sincerely desiring to know the truth; 
then the vast fields of truth lie open for 
his exploration and discovery. God must 
conceal himself behind his works, and veil 
42 



LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

his truth in forms that require study. We 
often wonder in the thick of the fight, 
especially when the battle goes against us, 
why God does not come forth and show 
himself and thus give victory to the cause 
of righteousness. We hear the buffeted 
and baffled patriarch of Uz saying in his 
distress: "Oh that I knew where I might 
find him! . . . Behold, I go forward, but 
he is not there; and backward, but I can- 
not perceive him: on the left hand, where 
he doth work, but I cannot behold him: 
he hideth himself on the right hand, that 
I cannot see him. 55 God himself has de- 
clared that no man can see his face and 
live, and certainly his presence would so 
awe and overpower us that there could 
be no freedom or naturalness of action, 
and hence no proper development of char- 
acter. He must withhold such a manifes- 
tation of himself as would be disturbing to 
the natural forces with which he has en- 
dowed man, his appetites, aspirations, rea- 
son, imagination, and will. Many truths 
too baldly stated would be disturbing and 
hurtful rather than helpful. Thus Saint 
Paul, in his First Epistle to the Thessa- 
43 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

lonians, said some very plain and strong 
things about the second coming of Christ. 
Many of the Thessalonians were greatly 
excited and disturbed by what he said 
and ran to extremes in their preparation 
for the event, even giving up all business, 
ceasing to work, and going about as "busy- 
bodies' 5 because they expected the imme- 
diate coming of the Lord. So that in his 
second epistle he had to warn them not 
to be "shaken in mind, or be troubled," 
as "by letter from us, as that the day of 
Christ is at hand." The light was too 
strong for the eye and had to be shaded 
by throwing over the truth an indefinite- 
ness as to time and circumstances of the 
great event, that the mind might resume 
its normal working. 

The possibility of failure to arrive at 
the exact truth because of this obscurity in 
some of its presentations cannot endanger 
the salvation of the soul, for judgment is 
to be in proportion to the light we have. 
If no man was to be saved but he who had 
full knowledge of the truth, none would be 
saved, for no one ever yet had such knowl- 
edge* Our judgment will be "according to 
44 



LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

that a man hath, and not according to that 
he hath not." 

The revelation was given by an om- 
niscient Being, who must have foreseen 
how it would be misunderstood, and he 
could have stated it in tabular form, like 
the Decalogue, so as to have avoided these 
misunderstandings. Our creed-makers had 
that much ability. When our Lord prayed 
that his disciples might be "one," he must 
have foreseen the divisions and misunder- 
standings that were so soon to arise. In 
no more words than are required to utter 
that prayer he could forever have rendered 
impossible the Arian controversy, the 
heresy of Pelagius, the controversy about 
the primacy of Saint Peter, the right of 
the pope of Rome to rule Christendom; 
and many other questions that have dis- 
turbed the peace of the church could have 
been settled or their very consideration 
rendered impossible. But he saw clearly 
that it was better for man's intellectual 
and spiritual development to leave the 
truth in the form in which we have it, 
rather than to remand man to an infantile 
state by doing his thinking for him and 
45 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

taking from him the necessity to struggle 
and contend for the truth. It is a great 
moral sieve, sifting out the unworthy, the 
captious, the insincere, the designing, and 
the false, as Saint Paul teaches when he 
says, "There must be also heresies among 
you, that they which are approved may 
be made manifest among you." The here- 
sies taught in Corinth, that seemed to 
give so much trouble, performed that use- 
ful office of sifting the wheat from the 
chaff. 

It was evidently the design in giving a 
revelation that a close and vital relation 
should be maintained between every soul 
of man and the Holy Ghost for spiritual 
power, illumination, and guidance "into all 
truth." This was the clear teaching of the 
Master in his address to the disciples on 
the personality and offices of the Holy 
Spirit, as recorded by Saint John. He 
teaches that it would be better for him to 
go away, that spiritual teaching and illu- 
mination might take the place of the formal 
words he was uttering, and that inde- 
pendent thinking under the guidance of the 
Holy Ghost would be far better for them 
46 



LIMITATIONS TO A REVELATION 

and the church for all time than to have a 
visible leader to whom they could go with 
questions when any difficult matter arose. 
Inward illumination is better than peda- 
gogy. 

The Bible is the norm and formal state- 
ment of the truth, but its interpretation 
and application to the individual life must 
be by the conscience and judgment il- 
luminated and guided by the Holy Spirit. 
The Word was inspired by the Spirit, and 
it should be read with a consciousness of 
that fact and with the prayer that the 
inspiring Spirit should become the inter- 
preter of the Word. He knows what was 
intended in the writing and he can make 
its meaning plain. Therefore prayer for 
the illumination and guidance of the Holy 
Spirit has always been considered an essen- 
tial to proper Bible-reading. The casual, 
the critical, or the careless reader may get 
very little and see very little significance 
in this revelation if it is read without this 
spiritual light upon it, for revelation is not 
in the book alone, but upon the book and 
upon the mind of man that it may reach 
the understanding aright. Revelation is a 
47 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

perpetual, ever-active movement of the 
Spirit of God, never finished and never 
suspended, if not in giving new truth, 
then in throwing new light on the old 
according to the needs of men. We 
greatly dishonor the Holy Spirit and his 
offices among men if we supposfe him less 
active now than at any former period. 
The interests involved are greater, the 
conditions of human life are more com- 
plex, the population of the world is larger, 
the progress of the kingdom of God is 
more rapid, and unless he has given up 
the field entirely the activities of the 
Spirit must be greater than at any former 
time. The flow of truth from the divine 
to the human mind must be as constant as 
that of sunlight from the sun, or of the air 
which we breathe, if man is to have the 
freshness and vigor of divine truth for his 
spiritual life. 



48 



CHAPTER IV 
THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

The Old Testament 

The Bible was an unconscious growth. 
Probably no one book was written with any 
thought that it would become a part of a 
sacred canon. The writers generally wrote 
under some immediate spur or impulse, on 
some local issues, or to meet some pressing 
contemporaneous need. If they had known 
the prominence and influence their writings 
were to have in the coming ages, they 
would have been self-conscious and inca- 
pable of responding perfectly to the move- 
ments of the Divine Spirit. It would not 
be possible for any human mind to have 
such an expectation with respect to its 
productions without being powerfully af- 
fected by it, and probably without being 
incapable of the simplicity and singleness 
of aim necessary in the adequate state- 
ment of the truth. 

The first books of the Bible were prob- 
49 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

ably written from the historical standpoint, 
to record and preserve the knowledge of 
important events. Then dramatic repre- 
sentations of the truth appear, after which 
come devotional books of praise and 
prayer. Next in order are the Wisdom 
books, containing proverbs, maxims, and 
wise sayings for practical life, and, finally, 
the prophets give us earnest appeals in 
behalf of righteousness and predictions of 
future events. In none of these writings 
is there any intimation that future ages 
were in the thought of the authors, and 
there is no manifest consciousness that 
what was written was to go into the 
formation of a sacred book to become the 
guide of God's people for all time. There 
was no statement or intimation that they 
were written with such an object in view, 
or that it was at the time the intention of 
the Divine Spirit that what was written 
should finally be used for such a purpose, 
or that it was intended ever to give such a 
book as the Bible to men. These separate 
writings each accomplished the purpose for 
which it was written, living and holding its 
place in the literature of the world among 
50 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

many similar productions, till at last the 
discerning minds among believers came to 
see the permanent and universal quality 
in the special message and the evidences 
of divine inspiration which it contained, 
and so gave it a place in the collection of 
books that finally made up the sacred 
canon. Some of them were several cen- 
turies in winning the recognition which 
gave them their present position. Some 
of them were very unpopular at the time 
of their appearance; some were greeted 
with a divided sentiment and heated con- 
troversy. Some of the prophets were ac- 
cused of disloyalty to their reigning 
sovereigns and of consorting with the 
enemies of the state; some were accepted 
as useful for instruction, but not as au- 
thority in matters of religion. Not till 
contemporaneous asperities had died away, 
and the essential truth emerged from the 
local and temporary conditions, were these 
productions fully appreciated and their 
high and universal quality recognized. 

The literary instinct, as well as the 
practical needs of a literature, grew as 
the centuries advanced, and in the later 
51 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

years of Israel's history many manuscripts 
appeared. They were historical, poetical, 
devotional, and dramatic, with the Israel- 
itish people as the center and boundary 
of thought. This fecundity of thought 
became embarrassing and naturally forced 
the question of the relative standing and 
value of these various productions. From 
those that were certainly divinely inspired 
they shaded off by gradations of quality 
to those that were certainly not divinely 
inspired, but it was exceedingly difficult 
to draw the line of just separation. It 
would not do to take the assumption or 
claim of the author, for some that were 
certainly inspired were written by men too 
modest to make any claim, while then, as 
in all subsequent history, some were very 
bold in claiming divine inspiration whose 
productions belied their claim. It would 
be unwise in a time of national conflict to 
ask a verdict concerning the inspiration of 
a passionately patriotic production that 
fitted in well with the circumstances and 
temper of the times, for a dispassionate 
and reliable judgment under such circum- 
stances would be improbable. Passion, 
52 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

prejudice, or party feeling must not enter 
here; the feelings awakened at the ap- 
pearance of such a production must be 
allowed to cool and the publication must 
be tried and proven in the stress of life's 
great needs by more than one generation 
before it can be recognized as worthy of a 
place in the sacred canon. Even then it 
was never possible to arrive at unanimity 
of judgment. To this day these differences 
persist, and the Roman Catholics accept as 
canonical various books which Protestants 
denominate apocryphal. 

A great number of manuscripts were be- 
fore the public and were in use in their 
schools, in public worship, and for in- 
struction in national history. The time 
came when the most discreet and learned 
saw that there must be a classification of 
their literature and a definite setting apart 
of such books as they considered authori- 
tative and worthy of being accepted as a 
revelation from God. The writings once 
issued were no longer in the power of 
their authors, but were wholly subject to 
the decision of those to whom they came 
as to what position they should occupy 
53 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

for instruction or authority over the minds 
of men; and even their claim to divine 
inspiration must be passed upon and ap- 
proved by men before they could have a 
place in the sacred canon. If the writers 
were inspired, they who composed the 
sacred canon by sifting out Hebrew litera- 
ture must have had some measure of the 
same inspiration to enable them to do 
their work wisely and well, which agrees 
with our general proposition that inspira- 
tion is a permanent gift to the church, 
expressing itself at different times accord- 
ing to conditions, circumstances, and char- 
acters. In exercising this office of 
classification the Hebrews divided their 
Scriptures into three departments: I. The 
Tora. II. The Prophets. III. The writ- 
ings of the Hagiographa. 

I. The Tora was composed of the five 
books of Moses. In early Israel the regu- 
lation of worship, and the disposition of 
public affairs as well, fell largely to the 
priests. They made decisions and com- 
municated the divine will by means of the 
lot, the ephod, and the Urim and Thumim. 
The sanctuary became the seat of gov- 
54 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

ernment, where judgments were rendered 
by those appointed to act for the people. 
These proceedings were called "inquiring 
of the Lord," and the decisions rendered 
were "the statutes of the Lord." In all 
these proceedings and judgments they nat- 
urally went back to the law of Moses and 
based their decisions on his teachings, 
which implied that they were accepted as 
divine authority. Thus, naturally, the 
books of Moses came to be recognized as 
the highest authority to which appeal 
could be made, as the very Word of the 
Lord to Israel. It is impossible to fix 
the time when these five books were 
thrown together as the recognized embodi- 
ment of Hebrew law. From the beginning 
of the organic life of Israel they must have 
held such a position in the public mind, 
but in the economy of the Hebrews the 
more formal declaration and setting apart 
did not occur till the existence of other 
writings claiming such recognition made 
the formal act necessary. Naturally, the 
rather vague reverence in which the writ- 
ings were held from the first came to 
definite form and clearer classification and 
55 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 



interpretation under the attrition of 
thought and the practical results of cen- 
turies of conflict and agitation in de- 
veloping national life and ecclesiastical 
polity. As all the great world forces were 
thrown into this seething vat with these 
writings, there could come out but one 
result: the law of Moses proved itself and 
won its position in the thought of the 
world as "the law of the Lord," just what 
it was declared to be from the first. 

II. The Prophets. Long after the 
"Tora," or law, had come to its recogni- 
tion another class of writings claimed rec- 
ognition as worthy of a place in the sacred 
canon — the Prophets. In this classifica- 
tion the Hebrews included Joshua, First 
and Second Samuel, First and Second 
Kings, and the writings of the later 
prophets. Of what we recognize as pro- 
phetic writings, Amos was the first in 
order of time, though spoken prophecy 
had been a great power in Israel for many 
centuries before the time of Amos. 
Whether these prophets wrote their mes- 
sages to the people, or delivered them in 
oral form and had them taken down at 
56 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

the time or afterward by some scribe, we 
do not know, but it is certain that some 
parts of them at least were written by 
divine direction. Isaiah in two places com- 
mands that his words be written down for 
the instruction of future ages. A hundred 
years after this Jeremiah is particular to 
have Baruch take down for preservation 
the words that fell from his lips, that this 
record might take the place of one that 
had been burned in the fire by Jehoakim, 
king of Israel. These prophetical books, in 
contrast with the books of the law, repre- 
sent the conscience, the faith, the spiritual 
life, the worship, and the ethical righteous- 
ness of the people of Israel. Here we find 
the enthusiasm and the heroism of faith, 
and the passionate love of righteousness 
that characterized the best life of the 
Hebrews. 

III. The writings of Hagiography. This 
third division is composed of literature later 
in origin than the law, and later than much 
of what is classed by the Hebrews as 
prophetical. These writings include First 
and Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, 
Ruth, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Canticles, 
57 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations. They con- 
tain practical precepts, proverbs, rules for 
holy living, dramatic treatment of life, 
facts of history, poetic utterances of joy, 
love, faith, hope, and the feelings and 
aspirations of a true religious life. This 
classification was not made by any one 
age, but it grew as the literature grew, 
and, of course, could not be completed till 
the last book, Malachi, was written. 

It is quite possible that some books in- 
cluded at one age were thrown out or lost 
in another age, as we find in the book of 
Numbers a book alluded to that is lost to 
us. Also in Joshua, in the account of the 
sun standing still, an appeal is made for 
confirmation to the lost book of Jasher, 
that then seemed to be an authority. 
What the selective conscience and judg- 
ment of the Hebrew people chose out of 
their literature as the Word of the Lord 
to them and to the world the ages have 
so accepted and held sacred. These three 
divisions are recognized in the New Testa- 
ament as they were held by the Jewish 
people generally. 

There was no determining conclave or 
58 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

conference that decided what books should 
go into the Old Testament canon. The 
religious consciousness of the Hebrew peo- 
ple, instructed and guided by the Holy 
Spirit, after a fair testing of the books in 
the school of experience, made the de- 
cision in a most formal way by accepting 
and using such as were approved. The 
religious consciousness of the race has 
changed about as little as has the con- 
sciousness of pleasure and pain, or of food 
and drink, and its decisions in Hebrew his- 
tory were practically what they would be 
now if acting under similar conditions and 
on the same class of facts. To what extent 
the counsel of the learned may have in- 
fluenced the common mind we have no 
means of knowing, and while we may 
suppose it to have been considerable, we 
have no reason to think that it would be 
out of harmony with that religious con- 
sciousness which was practically the same 
in the learned and the unlearned. Many 
books were bidding high for recognition, 
and there had to be careful discrimination 
and thorough sifting to get at the bottom 
truth concerning each one. If a book held 
59 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

its place in the faith of God's people 
through the varying experiences of one, 
three, or five hundred years, its standing 
was fixed. There never was any other 
authority, human or divine, that decided 
in a formal way what books should go into 
the formation of the Old Testament; yet 
there could be no higher authority than 
the concurrent testimony of thousands of 
people of best character who had tested 
the books in their own experiences. Es- 
pecially does this appear when we remem- 
ber that these experiences, as well as the 
books themselves, were under the control 
of the Holy Spirit. 



60 



CHAPTER V 

THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

(Continued) 

The New Testament 

A new literature sprang into being under 
the powerful appeal made to the human 
intellect by the incidents in the life of the 
Prophet of Nazareth, and much more by 
the wonderful circumstances of his death 
and resurrection. No life in history com- 
pared with his in thought-producing 
energy, in soul-arousing power, and the 
demand for full and formal statement was 
universal and insistent. Many books were 
written, some of them prejudiced, one- 
sided, incomplete, unsatisfactory. The 
evangelist Luke makes this the reason for 
venturing into the field of literature. He 
admits that many other accounts had been 
written, and seems to imply that they are 
not satisfactory to his mind, so he writes his 
own account to the honorable gentleman 
to whom his production is addressed, that 
61 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

he "may know the certainty of the things" 
wherein he had been instructed. Even the 
Gospels of Mark and Matthew were not 
entirely satisfactory to Luke, for they left 
out certain important teachings of the 
Master that he thought ought to be 
recorded. 

It must be observed that the literary 
movement was a little slow in starting, the 
first books of the New Testament not 
appearing till twenty years after the Lord's 
ascension. We must also remember that 
the Christians had a Bible which they 
highly venerated, and which seemed suffi- 
cient for their needs. Saint Paul preached 
in the synagogues, using the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures and making them the source of his 
material in expounding the kingdom of 
God as set up by Jesus Christ. In Rome 
he brought together a great company in 
his own house, "To whom he expounded 
and testified the kingdom of God, per- 
suading them concerning Jesus, both out 
of the law of Moses, and out of the proph- 
ets." These early Christians were so ab- 
sorbed and occupied preaching and building 
the Church of Christ that they had neither 
62 






THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

time nor strength for writing. We never 
should have had Saint Paul's great epis- 
tles had not God wisely ordered that he 
should be held in prison those .long years 
when he seemed to be so much needed in 
the field, that he might have quiet and 
time for that greatest service of his life 
in writing those wonderful productions that 
for two thousand years have been giving 
light in all the earth. 

The early Christian writings were mostly 
produced under the spur of some imme- 
diate and pressing necessity. They were 
addressed to a particular locality, to single 
individuals, or in response to appeals for 
counsel. There is no indication or intima- 
tion that any one of the writers had the 
faintest idea that his production would 
finally find a place in the sacred canon and 
be held in the same reverence as that 
which had attached to the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures. Greatly as they were appreciated 
by the Christians of the time, they could 
not be held in full sanctity till touched by 
age and with the veneration that finally 
invested the names of those who had seen 
the Lord, after they had passed into the 
63 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

fellowship of the church triumphant. There 
was no intimation while the apostles lived 
of a purpose to gather together the writ- 
ings of their age into one volume, to be a 
part of the sacred canon. That thought 
was a later development, for while the 
apostles lived, their public recital of the 
events worthy of mention in the life of 
our Lord, and their expositions of his 
teachings would have precedence over any- 
thing they might write, and in the public 
mind would seem to render unnecessary a 
written account. Not till their testimony 
was completed and they were removed 
would the church awake to the apprehen- 
sion of the great and enduring value of 
what they had written. 

The simplicity and naturalness of that 
literature, one of its greatest charms, is 
evidence that it came from the heart with 
a single purpose and a single aim, with no 
apprehension of the position to be assigned 
to it in the future. Only thus could the 
human mind be absolutely responsive to 
the motions of the Holy Spirit, when it 
was wholly absorbed with the one purpose 
of conveying the truth to a case of need. 
64 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

These writers make no demand that their 
productions shall be placed in the same 
category with the Hebrew Scriptures, nor, 
indeed, do they intimate any concern about 
the future disposition of them. They left 
their ministry of writing as their ministry 
of speech to the providence of God, not 
knowing which should thrive, "the early or 
the late sown," the written or the spoken 
word. They wrote under an inspiration to 
meet a present need, and it remained for 
the inspiring Spirit at a later period to in- 
dicate to Spirit-filled men the real char- 
acter and enduring worth of these pro- 
ductions. The apostolical church accepted 
them as authority for instruction in the 
facts of Christian history and in the doc- 
trines of Christian faith, but they could 
not class them with the writings of Moses 
or the prophets till there was a sufficient 
lapse of time to invest them with the air 
of sacredness that naturally falls over the 
things of the past when we are removed 
at a sufficient distance from them. From 
considering them as books of instruction in 
the facts of history, the principles of faith, 
and the practical duties of religion, it was 
65 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

easy to rise to the higher conception that 
they were divinely inspired and that they 
were to be incorporated with the Hebrew 
Scriptures as the culmination and comple- 
tion of their revelation for the permanent 
instruction of mankind. 

The Spirit's office as inspirer and teacher 
of the church did not cease when the apos- 
tolical writings were finished. He was the 
life of the church from the first, the source 
of its best thought and noblest achieve- 
ments, and he forever remains the inspira- 
tion of its real life and progress; he is the 
conservator of its aggressive spiritual power 
and of its right thinking. The promise was 
that he should abide "forever" with the 
church, and without him the church would 
be a dry, withered, and lifeless thing. We 
do him no greater dishonor and the church 
no greater wrong than to teach that the 
Holy Ghost is active only in great epochs 
and on special occasions. Inspiration is 
the abiding privilege, the great need, and 
the only adequate equipment of the church; 
the whole church is "the body of Christ," 
instinct, actuated, and alive by the in- 
dwelling Divine Spirit. It may be mani- 
66 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

fested in different forms and degrees, but 
he is always present in the church that is 
faithful to the divine covenant of grace 
in Christ Jesus. God did not lodge the 
glory and responsibility of revelation and 
redemption with any age or nation, but 
the whole race of every age is held to its 
part in the great work of inbreathing and 
communicating life and truth to humanity 
through Jesus Christ. The apostles wrote, 
and their writings threw such a glory over 
their age that we sometimes think inspira- 
tion ended with them, but their writings 
would have been no more than so much 
wastepaper had not the Divine Spirit 
moved upon the minds of a later period to 
discover that they were inspired of God 
and worthy of a place in the sacred canon. 
That there should be delay and differ- 
ences of opinion in coming to an agreement 
as to what books should be admitted to a 
place in the sacred canon was perfectly 
natural. The feeling of reverence that nat- 
urally arises toward a writing that has 
come down from a preceding generation, 
the practical experience and observed facts 
concerning the effects of a teaching, and the 
67 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

opportunity for gathering up all the facts 
concerning the production of a document, 
as well as the opportunity for considering 
and testing the claims for divine inspira- 
tion, were essential in the formation of the 
canon. If a very popular, influential, or 
learned minister in any city, or a great 
bishop or far- wandering missionary should 
write a treatise, history, or doctrinal epis- 
tle, there would be local or party interests 
that would clamor for giving it a place in 
the canon, and it would not be wise to pass 
upon it till a second and more impartial 
generation had arisen. Saint Paul's writ- 
ings would be very enthusiastically received 
in Gentile cities like Corinth, Ephesus, and 
Rome, but they would meet with great 
opposition and disfavor in Jerusalem and 
other Jewish cities. The epistle of Saint 
James, on the other hand, would be hailed 
with delight in Jerusalem and among "The 
twelve tribes scattered abroad," but among 
the peoples instructed in Saint Paul's great 
Christology and in his doctrine of justifi- 
cation by faith it would not be acceptable, 
and among them it would be declared un- 
worthy a place in the sacred canon. The 
68 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

personal and local feeling in these and 
other cases must die out before the time is 
ripe for deciding what writings shall make 
up the Bible. 

This treatment of the case brings into 
decided prominence the human element in 
Bible-making. But we are to remember 
that in not one of these writings is there 
any intimation that they were written with 
a view to their having a place in the Bible, 
or that they would be read by, or have any 
influence upon, future generations, or that 
the writers had any anticipation that a 
Bible would be formed out of the writings 
of that age. The whole history and method 
of redemption and revelation may be 
summed up in the one term, "God-man. 5 ' 
If the divine element is transcendent, the 
human element is essential; to deny either 
its true place is to devitalize and destroy 
the truth. To fail to recognize the human 
is hardly less fatal to the truth than to fail 
to recognize the divine agency in revela- 
tion. The two work as a composite union 
for a result that could not be reached if 
either were lacking. 

Jesus Christ went away from the infant 
69 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

church without giving any direction about 
writing or preparing an addition or supple- 
ment to the Hebrew Scriptures, nor did he 
give any directions about the organization 
or polity of his church so soon to be formed. 
Two great institutions were to be raised up 
for the evangelization of the world: a 
divine-human book to furnish material for 
preaching, and a divine-human organiza- 
tion called the church. The inspiration of 
the Holy Ghost was to be the formative 
force of both, but that force was to be 
manifested through the human intelligence, 
in terms and forms to be apprehended by 
the human understanding, and in response 
to human need. Both developed gradually 
and unconsciously, as the best life always 
does. The unfolding was slow, and it was 
not a forecasting of the future, but an 
effort to meet the need of the present. 
Men cared very little for written docu- 
ments or formal institutions, so long as the 
living witnesses of the glory of the Lord on 
fire with a holy enthusiasm kindled by 
personal contact with him were traveling 
everywhere reciting the thrilling facts of 
their own observations and experiences 
70 



THE MAKING OF THE CANON 

with him. There was little appreciation 
of or demand for a literature so long as 
the living preacher who had seen the 
Lord was available. The church had need 
of but few institutions or forms so long as 
its services were conducted in private 
houses or in the open air, and prior to the 
rise of a hymnology and liturgy. It was 
the office of the Holy Spirit to furnish the 
truth, the organization, and the means for 
disseminating and preserving it in re- 
sponse to human need and through the 
organ of the human intelligence. 

These two lines of the movement of the 
Spirit of God developed slowly, but when 
fairly developed they became the norm and 
suggestion of truth for all after times. It 
has been the habit of all theological 
teachers and ecclesiastical builders to go 
back to this early age of inspiration for 
authority in their teaching. But one only 
needs to study the origin of the diaconate 
in the sixth chapter of the Acts of the 
Apostles, or the subjectivity of the writ- 
ings of Saint Paul, to see how large the 
human element is in both lines of the 
developing kingdom of God. There could 
71 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

have been in all this process of develop- 
ment no thought of producing and project- 
ing into the future a literature to rule the 
thought of coming ages, for that early 
church was thoroughly obsessed with the 
idea that Christ would return during the 
lifetime of that generation and take into 
his own hands jthe reins of government. 



72 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NEW TESTAMENT BECOMING 
HOLY SCRIPTURE 

The early New Testament was a flame 
of religious enthusiasm. Four events like 
the crucifixion, the resurrection, the ascen- 
sion, and Pentecost occurring in a period 
of fifty days, and the marvelous initial suc- 
cesses of the church, are sufficient explana- 
tion and justification of it. That this 
enthusiasm ran into excesses of fanaticism 
along some fines was indicated by the 
disastrous attempt at community of goods, 
the folly of which soon became apparent. 
In this great movement that permeated all 
classes the living preacher who could re- 
port upon these great events as an eye- 
witness or participator in them was the 
chief agent and the greatest force. The 
incidents of the Lord's life, death, resur- 
rection, and ascension, with such explana- 
tions as might be given, would be repeated 
over and over to entranced audiences that 
would never tire of hearing the wonderful 
73 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 



story, and to whom the facts would seem to 
justify the most extravagant expectations 
for the future. There was, then, no need 
for written documents, nor was the temper 
of mind such as to awaken any desire for 
them. The oral teacher who could recite 
and expound the events that had just 
occurred with thrilling effect was all the 
church then wanted. 

There was no apprehension of need for 
written documents in the future, for in this 
great enthusiasm of the new life the church 
had become thoroughly obsessed with the 
idea that the Lord would soon return, over- 
throw his enemies, take possession of the 
kingdom, and carry his believing children 
home to heaven. There would, therefore, 
be no need even for the Hebrew Bible very 
long, and certainly no need for any addi- 
tion to it. They had not carefully studied 
the sayings of the Master about his second 
coming, and in their eager enthusiasm had 
jumbled them all together in one mass, as 
referring to one event. They did not dis- 
cern that some of his utterances referred to 
his resurrection, which was a real "coming 
again" after having gone away, some to 
74 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

the day of Pentecost, which gave a fulfill- 
ment to his saying that, "There be some 
of them that stand here, which shall not 
taste of death, till they see the kingdom of 
God come with power/' but they seemed 
to confound all his sayings on the subject 
with the last great event, "When the Son 
of man shall come in his glory, and all the 
holy angels with him," to judge the world. 
They fully expected him to come during 
their lifetime and that they would be per- 
mitted to share in the glory of his triumph 
over the world. 

With such an expectation of the con- 
summation of all things so soon, there 
could be no thought of forming a new 
Bible, or an enlargement of the old by the 
addition of Christian writings. 

This enthusiasm that was burning bright 
with an aggressive flame was constantly 
fed with new fuel in the form of wonderful 
miracles, interpositions, and deliverances 
hardly less astonishing and assuring than 
the great redemptive events themselves. 
The witnesses who were testifying for their 
Lord, and the apostles who were preaching 
his gospel, with the great body of believers, 
75 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 



accepted these miraculous incidents as a 
divine attestation of the correctness of 
their teachings, and this added inconceiv- 
ably to their influence with the people. 
The gift of tongues and other miraculous 
gifts of the Holy Spirit continued in the 
church for many years, feeding the flame 
of its enthusiasm. This was true as late 
as the writing of Saint Paul's First Epistle 
to the Corinthians, as anyone may see by 
reading the fourteenth chapter, a work that 
was not written till about thirty years 
after Pentecost. Those years constituted 
the period of dynamics in the church, 
when the miraculous powers of the Spirit 
of God were employed to propel the new 
church in its victorious march among the 
nations. 

Not until twenty years had passed after 
the resurrection of the Lord did anyone 
think it worth while to put anything down 
in writing. By that time the mind of the 
church had cooled a little, its thinking had 
been clarified by experience and broaden- 
ing knowledge, and the disappointment in 
the expected immediate reappearance of 
the Lord aided the coming in of a broader 
76 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

outlook upon the needs and possibilities 
of the church. Then as the early witnesses 
were passing away by death, their number 
becoming fewer and the number of con- 
gregations becoming greater, it became in- 
creasingly difficult to secure a living teacher 
who had personal knowledge of the events 
of which they wished to hear. Many of 
the most distinguished ministers had gone 
into foreign parts on missionary tours, or 
were locked up in prisons. Then a written 
communication from these absent leaders 
of the church, many of whom had endured 
untold sufferings and hardships that awak- 
ened great sympathy for them among the 
people, would be hailed with great joy, 
and reading them to the congregations 
would produce a profound religious sensa- 
tion. At first there could have been no 
thought with the writers or with those to 
whom these productions were sent that 
they would ever take their place by the 
side of the Hebrew Scriptures, and be 
held sacred and authoritative, as they were. 
But when the living witnesses had all 
passed away, the written testimonies which 
they had left took on a new importance, 
77 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

and then arose the task of discriminating 
and deciding which were to be regarded as 
divinely inspired and authoritative. We 
can no more believe that this selection was 
left to human caprice and fallible judg- 
ment than that the writing itself, or the 
forming of the infant church polity was the 
product of the unaided human mind. It 
was the office and work of the Holy Spirit 
to instruct and guide the church, and he 
could best do this by giving it a divinely 
inspired literature that should feed its in- 
telligence and inspire its faith. 

Fortunately, we have more light on the 
formation of the Christian Bible than we 
have upon the early stages of the Hebrew 
Scriptures. The literary impulse had been 
greatly intensified and developed, with a 
much broader outlook and keener interest 
in all world questions. The new faith had 
its roots in and received contributions from 
all the great world centers, and it left 
tracks on the sands everywhere by which 
its movements can now be traced and 
verified. The growth of the New Testa- 
ment is under our eyes, and we can see 
the process as it slowly develops. 
78 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

Let us take our stand in one of the 
Christian congregations of Rome, the first 
Sabbath after Saint Paul was beheaded 
there, and watch the feeling of reader and 
congregation as the Epistle to the Romans 
is read. There would be an interest, en- 
thusiasm, and recognition of its divine 
quality such as had never been before, and 
every one would be ready to acclaim it as 
the very word of God through the blessed 
Paul. Or, if we should visit one of the 
colonies of Jews settled up on the banks 
of the Nile, where the gospel of Christ had 
been accepted, and chance to be in one of 
their congregations just after they had re- 
ceived news of the death of Saint James, 
bishop of Jerusalem, and they should bring 
out and read his epistle addressed to "the 
twelve tribes scattered abroad," we would 
hear them exclaiming in their spiritual rap- 
ture: "It is nothing less than the voice of 
God! There is nothing in the writings of 
Moses superior to it." And so if we would 
follow every book of the New Testament 
through its early experiences, we should 
find some clear and decided recognition of 
its quality that gradually won its way by 
79 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

inherent merit, till it was crowned and 
throned as Holy Scripture. 

The records are wonderfully satisfying to 
the most critical mind. The period of the 
oral gospel was drawing to its close. The 
story of eyewitnesses had been told in all 
the great world centers, with about such 
variations of details as we find in the writ- 
ten Gospels. No doubt the differences be- 
tween Saint Paul, Saint James, Saint Peter, 
and Saint John had been noted and dis- 
cussed, much as they have by Christian 
scholars of all the ages. Every city would 
have its favorite apostle, Gospel, or Epistle, 
and one would say, "I am for Paul, or I am 
for Cephas, or I for Apollos, or I for 
Christ." Some of these apostles preached 
at one place what they had not at another 
as the result of growing knowledge. As in 
the case of the eloquent Apollos, he had 
been preaching with great power in a num- 
ber of cities, "knowing only the baptism of 
John," but when more fully instructed he 
added the great distinctively Christian 
truths to his preaching, and such changes 
in the preachers themselves must have 
produced no little unrest and discussion 
80 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

among the people. All things were in a 
state of flux, tending slowly toward a 
settled and fixed condition when the un- 
changing written productions of the apos- 
tles should be accepted as inspired of God 
for final authority. . 

We must not overlook the fact that there 
were great numbers of what have been 
called "logia," or written scraps of informa- 
tion about the Christ. They were incom- 
plete, mixed with legends, or trivial and 
personal matters that would render them 
unsuitable for public reading or for a place 
in the Bible. A gentleman in Jerusalem on 
business could not fail to write home some 
account of a strange prophet that had 
visited the city, and he would give a report 
of his sayings and doings. A gentleman 
from Alexandria traveling through Pales- 
tine would happen at Nain the day the 
widow's son was raised to life. He would 
write home an account of this and of other 
wonderful things he had seen and heard. 
Some poor man rescued from a life of pain 
and weakness by the touch of Jesus would 
spend part of his new strength in writing 
to his distant mother an account of this, 
81 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 



and of many other blessed things done by 
the wonderful Prophet of Nazareth. Any- 
one can see that there must have been a 
great flood of these "logia" distributed 
everywhere, but such an admixture of the 
impossible, the absurd, the legendary, the 
fanciful, the fanatical, and the deliberately 
false that they had to be used with great 
care. Many scholars suppose that they 
were the storehouse of material on which 
the writers of the New Testament drew 
largely for their material. But no man 
knows anything about that. Some think 
they can see marks of it in New Testament 
writings; others think they are imaginary, 
It certainly would derogate nothing from 
the inspiration of a production to show 
that the author derived his information 
from the oral or written communication of 
another, for the inspiration of the author 
would seem to verify the correctness of the 
information. It is a matter where there is 
no room and no need for dogmatism; a 
man may conjecture what he pleases about 
the sources of information so long as he 
allows the imprimatur of inspiration. Out 
of all this melange of literature it was im- 
82 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

perative that the church for its peace and 
purity of doctrine and teaching should 
select what would be an authoritative stan- 
dard of faith and practice. To this we now 
come. 

Passing by some others, the first witness 
we care to bring forward is Papias, bishop 
of Hierapolis, in Phrygia. He was born 
twenty years before the death of Saint 
John, lived in Hierapolis, where he met 
the daughters of Philip the evangelist, who 
were prophetesses in the days of Saint 
Paul when he was entertained for a long 
time at their father's house. He numbered 
among his friends the great Polycarp, and 
others who had been associated with the 
twelve. He was a very earnest student of 
all the records upon which he could lay 
his hands that gave any information about 
the sayings or doings of Jesus Christ. He 
speaks of two Johns, calling one, evidently 
the Saint John of the Gospels, "the elder." 
He says, "John the elder told Papias that 
Matthew wrote the Logia," that is, the 
sayings of Jesus in Hebrew. "And this 
too, the elder said, Mark, the interpreter 
of Peter, wrote down accurately, yet not 
83 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

in order, all that he (Peter) told as said or 
done by Christ. For he (Mark) himself 
did not hear the Lord nor was a disciple of 
his, but — of Peter, who used to give 
teachings to suit the immediate wants, but 
not as a connected narrative, so that Mark 
made no mistake. For he took care of one 
thing, not to leave out anything he heard 
nor give anything in a wrong way." 

The first Gospel written was this by 
Saint Mark, the material for which was 
derived from the public addresses of Saint 
Peter and from private interviews with 
him. Soon after followed the Gospel by 
Matthew, then that by Luke, and about 
twenty-five years after came the Gospel of 
John. But all these came after the death 
of Saint Paul, so that in none of his Epistles 
is there mention of any of these Gospels, or 
of any other Christian writings recognized 
as scripture. We are just now at that 
period when this recognition began slowly 
to appear. It was not by any miracle, 
prophet's dictum, or decree of council or 
conference, but by the constant growing 
use of these Christian writings in public 
worship and for private instruction in the 
84 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

things of God. A book that was found 
worthy to be read in public service with 
increasing appreciation grew constantly to- 
ward a place in the sacred volume. The 
Holy Spirit in the church recognized the 
Holy Spirit in the Word, and that was the 
determining and guiding force. 

The postapostolic age begins about A. D. 
100 with a letter written from the Church 
of Christ in Rome to the church in Corinth, 
that marks another stage in the rising tide 
of Christian literature. It is believed by 
scholars to have been written by Clement 
of Rome, and while it does not quote 
formally from the Gospels as recognized 
scripture, it does use much of the language 
of the Gospels in references that show he 
was familiar with them and held them in 
high regard as sources of Christian truth. 
Irenseus says of him, "Clement had seen 
the blessed apostles and conversed with 
them, and had the preaching of the blessed 
apostles still sounding in his ears." 

Another most distinguished witness 

comes onto the stand from the sacred city 

of Antioch, the most important city in 

early Christian history after Jerusalem. 

85 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Ignatius was the bishop there at the end 
of the first century. He was put to death 
for his faith early in the second century, 
and on his way to martyrdom at Rome he 
wrote seven letters, to the Ephesians, the 
Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, 
the Philadelphians, the Smyrnseans, and to 
Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna. In all 
these letters he shows great familiarity 
with our New Testament. He does not 
refer to its teachings as equal in authority 
with the Hebrew Scriptures, but treats it 
with a respect verging toward such a 
recognition. In the city of Antioch he 
stood in the very places made sacred by 
Paul, Barnabas, Peter, and all the great 
Christian leaders, and was thoroughly fa- 
miliar with their works and writings. He 
is therefore an important witness for the 
existence and growing reverence for the 
writings of the New Testament as we now 
have it. 

A great character now comes before us 
to give his testimony in the person of 
Polycarp. There is no more fragrant name 
in Christian history, no one more revered 
for his services while living and for his 
86 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

steadfast faith when dying as a martyr. 
The readers of church history will remem- 
ber his noble answer to the governor when 
he stood at the stake ready for them to 
kindle the flames. The governor tried to 
evade executing him, and he cried at the 
last: "Swear, and I release you. Revile 
Christ." Polycarp replied: "Eighty and 
six years do I serve him, and he has never 
done me wrong. And how can I blaspheme 
my King that saved me?" He wrote a 
letter to the Philippians, the people to 
whom one of Paul's Epistles was written. 
That letter is full of the New Testament, 
used as though he thought it most au- 
thoritative and useful to them, at least 
most persuasive and influential in leading 
them to that which was for their greatest 
good. He does not speak of the New Tes- 
tament as Bible, but he uses it with a 
respect that shows that it had come near 
to that in his own thought. 

Only a few years ago "The Teaching of 
the Apostles" was discovered and given to 
the Christian world. It dates from about 
120, though parts of it are much older. 
It corroborates the witnesses already heard 
87 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

in these pages in support of the position 
that the New Testament as we now have it 
was in general use, with a degree of respect 
and reverence, not equal to but approach- 
ing the prevailing feeling toward the He- 
brew Scriptures. All through it there is a 
free use of the Gospels, of all the Epistles 
of Paul and of other writers. It is, of 
course, not so circumstantial and satisfac- 
tory to us as it would have been if the 
author had written with an eye to the fact 
that his work would pass under the critical 
eye of the twentieth century. He wrote for 
the good of those whom he was addressing, 
without technical care, in an easy, flowing 
style, with great simplicity and sincerity. 

We might add much more testimony of 
the same kind as that already given, from 
the letter of Barnabas, from Valentinus, 
Hermas, and many others, but those who 
desire to follow the subject further will 
know where to find the literature for it. 
We now come to a later period and higher 
development of New Testament influence. 
Moving forward fifty years, we come to the 
great Roman churchman, Justin Martyr. 
We pause with him only long enough to say 
88 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

that he reports that about forty years 
after Saint John's death the Gospels are 
being regularly read along with the Old 
Testament, sometimes preceding it as of 
greater importance. This marks a de- 
cided advance in the use of the New 
Testament. 

A little later we have a conclusive proof 
of the prominence the New Testament had 
secured in the life of the church by the 
publication of Tation's Diatessaron, or the 
Book of the Four. This is proof that the 
four Gospels were in use, and in such 
general use as to justify the labor and 
expense of such a publication. 

We have a mutilated fragment of a most 
important old document discovered a few 
years ago in the Ambrosian Library of 
Milan. It is called the Muratorian Frag- 
ment. It dates from about 170, and con- 
tains the oldest known list of the books of 
the New Testament. It begins with the 
Gospel of Saint Luke, all above that being 
torn off; the lost part almost certainly 
contained the names of Matthew and 
Mark. Following Saint Luke is the Gos- 
pel by John, then the Acts of the Apostles, 
89 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

after that the thirteen epistles of Saint 
Paul. The Epistle of Jude, two epistles of 
John, the Revelation of John, and the 
Revelation of Peter, are also named. The 
Epistle of James, First and Second Peter, 
and the Epistle to the Hebrews were 
omitted, as these probably were not gen- 
erally known in the west till a later period. 
We now turn to another very important 
witness in the person of Irenseus, bishop of 
Lyons in Gaul. He was a native of Asia 
Minor, and thus became one of the living 
bonds between the east and the west, 
having been in Rome, and finally bishop 
of Lyons. He saw Polycarp in his boy- 
hood and had unusual opportunities for 
knowing the inner life of the church, its 
recognized literature, and the respect in 
which its various writings were held. He 
speaks of the four Gospels, and says, "The 
Holy Spirit said by Matthew," showing 
that the church then held the inspiration 
of the Gospels. He also mentions as 
"scripture" the Acts of the Apostles, 
twelve epistles of Saint Paul (omitting 
Philemon), the Revelation of Saint John, 
also First John, First Peter, and Hebrews. 
90 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

In reciting how he used to see the blessed 
Polycarp when an old man sit and repeat 
what he had heard John and other eye- 
witnesses say about the works and words 
of the Lord, he uses this significant lan- 
guage, "And all that he said was in strict 
agreement with the Scriptures." This 
shows that the New Testament books were 
then regarded as scripture. 

From Irenseus we return east again to 
hear from Clement of Alexandria, one of 
the great churchmen of that age. In 
speaking of one of the sayings of Jesus, 
he says, "We have not this saying in the 
four Gospels which have been handed down 
to us; it is to be found in the Gospel to the 
Egyptians." He quotes from the Acts of 
the Apostles, twelve epistles of Saint Paul 
(omitting Philemon), the Epistle to the 
Hebrews (which he says is by Saint Paul), 
First John, First Peter, Jude, and the 
Revelation of Saint John. He shows that 
the line of separation was not yet sharply 
drawn, as do some of these other witnesses 
I have quoted, by referring to other writ- 
ings as inspired that were later rejected, 
as the epistles of Clement and Barnabas, 
91 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 






the Revelation of Peter and the Shep- 
herd. 

From Alexandria we pass west on the 
continent of Africa to historic old Carthage 
to hear from one of the greatest minds of 
that age, Tertullian. He was a sturdy, 
stirring man of wonderful power and in- 
fluence. He complains of a clumsy trans- 
lation of the New Testament into Latin, 
now in use in his churches, that he does 
not like. This Latin Testament, as his 
quotations show, contained all the books 
of our present New Testament except the 
Epistle of James, Second Peter, and He- 
brews. 

This brief outline of the testimony of 
the postapostolic church brings us down 
to the year 200. We have not found, nor 
can there be found, any decree or formal 
action setting apart a certain number of 
books to be accepted as inspired and au- 
thoritative in the church. But we have 
found a growing use in the churches, and 
an increasing reverence for certain books 
held to be inspired of God, with slight 
variations in the books included in the 
lists in various cities. In a few of the 
92 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

churches some of the books now in the 
canon were not received, such as the 
Epistles of James, Second Peter, Second 
and Third John, Jude, Hebrews, and Rev- 
elation. In some of the churches certain 
books now considered apocryphal were 
accepted, as the epistles of Clement, Bar- 
nabas, Hermas, and the Revelation of 
Peter and the Shepherd. It is slow yet 
substantial progress for one hundred and 
forty years of Christian development. 

We now pass over a hundred years and 
come to the period of persecution under 
the Emperor Diocletian. The lives of 
Christians were sacrificed, their Scriptures 
burned, and their assemblies broken up. 
The eagerness of the persecutors to destroy 
the Scriptures is one of the best evidences 
of the esteem in which they were held by 
the church. The great church historian, 
Eusebius, who had seen the Scriptures 
burned in the market place by the perse- 
cutors, is our first witness. In 331 Con- 
stantine, the Christian emperor, is on the 
throne, and he sends to Eusebius in Jeru- 
salem an order for "Fifty copies of the Di- 
vine Scriptures on prepared skins, by skilled 
93 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 






scribes." In fulfilling this order for "the 
Divine Scriptures" Eusebius divided the 
writings which were claimed to be scrip- 
ture into three classes, as follows: 

I. The accepted books, which include the 
New Testament as we have it with the 
exception of these seven books, the Epistles 
of James, Jude, Hebrews, Second Peter, 
Second and Third John, and Revelation. 

II. The controverted books, that is, 
books received in some places and not in 
others. This list is composed of the seven 
books omitted in the first list. 
| III. The spurious books, in which he 
names the Epistle of Barnabas, and the 
Shepherd of Hermas. 

This testimony substantiates two points: 
that the term "Divine Scriptures" was used 
by Constantine and accepted by Eusebius 
as applying to the New Testament, and 
that the books of the New Testament in 
the opinion of Eusebius were substantially 
as we have them. It was the opinion of 
Tischendorf — and many scholars agree 
with him — that the manuscript which he 
discovered in the Convent of Saint Cath- 
arine on Mount Sinai, and the manuscript 
94 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

in the Vatican Library in Rome, were of 
this number of fifty prepared by Eusebius. 

Thirty years after this the great Athana- 
sius in Alexandria, who has the credit of 
having saved the church from heresy, pre- 
pares his annual letter to the clergy to be 
read by them in the churches. In that 
letter he gives a list of the accepted books 
of the Bible, and after completing the Old 
Testament he comes to the New Testa- 
ment, and gives as his list exactly the 
books which we now have in the New 
Testament. 

We now go back to the church at Rome 
for our last word of testimony on this sub- 
ject. In the year 383, at the request of 
Pope Damascus, the great scholar Jerome 
began the revision of the old Latin Testa- 
ment. This was the beginning of his great 
work, the Vulgate Bible, which for one 
thousand years was the Bible of all Europe. 
In this revision the books he gives are 
exactly the books we have now in the 
New Testament. 

This practically completes the discussion 
of this subject in the present treatment of 
it. Much fuller and very convincing evi- 
95 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

dence might have been given if we had not 
feared overtaxing of the reader's patience. 
It will be observed that there is here no 
mention about a determination of the books 
that should belong to the New Testament 
by any council, conference, or other eccle- 
siastical assembly of the church. This is 
for the simple and sufficient reason that 
there never was any such action. The 
common spiritual consciousness of the 
church settled that question through three 
hundred years of development, and from 
that decision there is no appeal. In the 
sense in which the word used to be em- 
ployed, there is not, and there never was, 
a canon of the New Testament. We use 
the word only in an accommodated sense. 



96 



CHAPTER VII 

THE APOCRYPHA 

There can be no fair and thorough dis- 
cussion of the making of the Bible that 
does not take account of the Apocrypha, 
which has been held, and is still held by 
many, as a true and legitimate part of 
Holy Scripture. The Bible is not the 
clear-cut product of a recognized authority, 
the exact boundaries of which may be de- 
termined with mathematical accuracy; but 
it is, rather, a clear stream flowing through 
muddy waters, the margins of which are 
bordered with a mixed condition that shade 
off into that with which it has nothing in 
common. The literary impulse that grew 
stronger as the life of the race deepened 
and broadened, under the stimulating in- 
fluence of the great truths of revelation, 
was very active in the stirring period be- 
tween Malachi and the coming of our 
Lord. Some of the productions of that 
period seem quite up to the plane of 
inspiration in moral and spiritual elevation, 
while others are trivial and worthless. In 
97 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

drawing the line between inspired and un- 
inspired, both in the Old and in the New 
Testament, some books were very near the 
line on both sides, some barely winning, and 
others as narrowly failing of recognition. 

The books of the Apocrypha have held 
a semisacred position through all history. 
They have been held by many as equal in 
inspiration and authority to the other 
books of the Old Testament, but a still 
larger number have refused to concede this 
much to them, while holding them of great 
value for instruction in the history of 
Israel and for edification. They are per- 
meated with the devotional spirit that 
characterizes all Hebrew literature, they 
maintain the high ethical standard set up 
in the Old Testament, and have the same 
insistence upon supreme loyalty to Jehovah. 
They seem to be the product of spiritually 
minded rather than of Spirit-guided men; 
at least this was the judgment of those 
who determined the Hebrew canon. 

In order to accuracy and clearness of 

thought it is well here to state that the 

literature of that period between Malachi 

and Christ was divided into two parts: 

98 



THE APOCRYPHA 

first, the books that we include in the 
Apocrypha; and, second, the books known 
as apocalyptic. The first were historical 
and practical, the second prophetical in 
form without prophetic inspiration, and 
more given to the portrayal of disasters 
than to the unfolding of the glories of the 
coming kingdom of God. Saint Jude rec- 
ognizes the truthfulness of one passage at 
least in the book of Enoch, which is one 
of the apocalyptic books, but no strong 
claim has ever been made for the recog- 
nition of these books as inspired. 

The books of the Apocrypha, which ap- 
proach so near to inspiration as to have a 
kind of halo about them in our minds, are, 
First and Second Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 
the Remainder of Esther, the Wisdom of 
Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Song of 
the Three Children, Story of Susanna, Bel 
and the Dragon, Prayer of Manasses, and 
First and Second Maccabees. The first 
point to fix in our minds concerning these 
books is that they never were admitted 
into the Hebrew Bible; that volume 
closed with Malachi. 

But to understand that period and the 
99 



THE MAKING OP THE BIBLE 

religious influence acquired by these books 
we must look beyond the established He- 
brew communion. There was at that time 
a large, thrifty, enterprising Hebrew popu- 
lation in all the trading centers of the 
world. Two influences were responsible for 
this: first, the captives carried away to 
Babylon and into Persia never all returned 
to Palestine. Many of them grew strong 
and influential in the lands to which they 
were carried, and found it to their interests 
and agreeable to their tastes to remain; 
second, the opportunities of traffic and 
business in such enterprising cities as 
Antioch, Corinth, and Alexandria drew 
many of the most enterprising Hebrews 
away from their native land for the better 
conditions offered. In all these commer- 
cial centers the Greek language was in 
general use, and where the Greek language 
went, Greek arts, ideas, and methods of 
life naturally followed. The Hebrew ele- 
ment in these communities was touched 
and modified by these influences. Saul of 
Tarsus was brought up in such a com- 
munity, and, strict Jew as he was, his 
whole life shows the influence of this en- 
100 



THE APOCRYPHA 

vironment upon the intellectual develop- 
ment of his young life. Naturally, the old 
Hebrew exclusiveness and strictness would 
give way to more liberal thoughts and feel- 
ings, and there grew up a broader-minded, 
a more open-minded generation of Jews 
than had ever before appeared. While this 
may seem to have been a loss in one way, 
it was a great gain in another way, for this 
element in the life of the nations was a 
people prepared and made ready for the 
approach of Christianity. It was among 
these people that Christianity had its first 
great triumphs. It came to them on the 
plane of the Hebrew Scriptures to which 
they were still devoted, but it made cer- 
tain additions to them, a method for which 
their liberal tendencies had prepared them. 
If we follow Saint Paul in his missionary 
tours, we find him everywhere going into 
the synagogue of the Jews, opening the He- 
brew Bible and arguing from it that "this 
Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ." 
This vast Grseco-Hebrew population had 
its most learned and influential center at 
Alexandria in Egypt. To that entire popu- 
lation the Apocrypha appealed more power- 
101 



THE MAKING OP THE BIBLE 

fully than to the more strict Hebrews. It 
fell in with their liberal tendencies to give 
it larger consideration than was customary 
among the regular Jews, and from this 
center in Alexandria especially went forth 
influences that affected its relation to the 
Bible for all time. The king of Egypt, 
Ptolemy Philadelphus, who took a great 
interest in the Jews and in their literature, 
conceived the happy thought of giving 
them their Bible in the Greek language, 
the language with which they were most 
familiar. So, about B. C. 250, he secured 
the translation of the Hebrew Bible into 
the Greek language by Seventy, or, to 
speak more accurately, seventy-two of the 
best scholars of the age, from which nu- 
merical fact it derived the name by which 
it has generally been known, the Septua- 
gint. Hardly any other literary event has 
played so large a part in the growing 
thought of the world as this translation 
has, not only in Egypt and Palestine, but 
throughout the world. To gratify these 
Jews of "the dispersion," who naturally 
came to have laxer views about inspiration 
than was common among strict Hebrews, 
102 



THE APOCRYPHA 

the Apocrypha was bound up with the 
other books of the Bible. The books of 
the Apocrypha came in by degrees in suc- 
cessive additions without formal action or 
declaration, and so came into common use 
as a kind of subordinate scripture without 
any clearly defined or well understood 
standing or authority. Thus they became 
linked to the Septuagint version in a rela- 
tion that has proven wonderfully persistent 
and embarrassing. So at that early date 
there were practically two Bibles, the He- 
brew canon and the Septuagint version 
with its apocryphal addenda. 

A very important question now arises: 
What was the attitude of the early Chris- 
tian Church toward these two versions? 
One of the first things that strike us is 
that our Lord and the apostles made 
nearly all their quotations from the Septua- 
gint version. This we must believe was 
not because of a preference for that ver- 
sion, or for its relation to the Apocrypha, 
but because it was the only Bible three 
was in the language of the people. The 
people did not understand the Hebrew lan- 
guage; they used the Greek, hence the 
103 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Greek Bible was used in conveying to 
them a message from the Scriptures. The 
question as to which was the true Bible, 
the Palestinian or the Alexandrian, cannot 
have been considered a very important one, 
for there is no allusion to it in all the 
apostolical writings. 

The testimony of the early fathers of 
the Christian Church with practical una- 
nimity supports the Hebrew canon as the 
true Bible, but without rejecting the 
Apocrypha in every case, as worthy of a 
place with the other sacred writings. There 
is often a vagueness of statement, an ap- 
parent effort to gloss over a difficulty that 
leaves us in doubt of the author's real 
position. Melito, bishop of Sardis (150- 
170), gives a list of the books of the Bible 
containing only the twenty-two of the He- 
brew canon, but he gives the titles and the 
order of the LXX, leaving us in doubt 
whether he may not have combined two 
or more books under one title. The 
learned Origen (185-254), in dealing with 
this question has a similar vagueness and 
want of definite statement that leaves us 
in doubt as to his exact meaning. Irenaeus, 
104 



THE APOCRYPHA 

bishop of Lyons in Gaul; Clement of Alex- 
andria, the city where the Apocrypha had 
its recognition; and Tertullian, of North 
Africa, all commanding personalities in the 
early church, quote from the Apocrypha and 
have it bound up with their Bibles. The 
"Old Latin" version of North Africa was 
made directly from the Alexandrian Bible 
of the LXX and contained the Apocrypha. 
Coming down to the great church his- 
torian Eusebius, a leading authority on 
questions of the canon, we find in his 
writings three separate lists of the books 
in the canon of the Scriptures, and in every 
case he omits the Apocrypha. Cyril, bishop 
of Jerusalem, a little later is very decided 
against the use of the Apocrypha as scrip- 
ture. Among other things he says: "Learn 
from the church what are the books of the 
Old and New Testament, and I pray you 
read nothing of the apocryphal books. For 
the translation of the Divine Scriptures 
which were spoken by the Holy Spirit was 
accomplished through the Holy Spirit. 
Read the twenty-two books which these 
rendered, but have nothing to do with 
apocryphal writings." Equally explicit is 
105 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

the testimony of the great Christian leader 
of the fourth century, Athanasius, bishop of 
Alexandria. He says, "All the books of the 
Old Testament are in number 22." Then 
he proceeds to give the names of the books, 
just as we have them to-day. The synod of 
Laodicea (360) gives the same list in enumer- 
ating the books of the Bible. Some other 
authorities of that period were more favor- 
able to the use of the Apocrypha as scripture. 
We now turn to the Church of Rome, 
which represents nearly one half of the 
nominal Christianity of the world. We 
here find the vagueness and indefiniteness 
that had so long prevailed coming to a 
definite and clear statement in the decree 
of the Council of Trent, adopted on April 
8, 1546. The Vulgate Bible prepared by 
and under the direction of that great 
scholar of the fourth century Jerome, for 
a thousand years the Bible of Europe, at 
first excluded all but two books of the 
Apocrypha, but gradually they crept in till 
at the time of the meeting of the Council 
of Trent they were all bound up with the 
canonical books. Martin Luther strongly 
denounced the use of the Apocrypha, in- 
106 



THE APOCRYPHA 

sisting that only the Hebrew canon of the 
Old Testament and the acknowledged 
books of the New Testament should be 
admitted as of authority. This was as a 
red flag to the Council, which was burning 
with fury against everything Lutheran. 
Though opposed by all the best scholars 
and ablest thinkers of the church, the 
proposed action was rushed through the 
Council, in which occurs the following: 
"The holy Ecumenical and General Coun- 
cil of Trent, following the example of the 
orthodox fathers, venerates all the books 
of the Old and New Testaments, with an 
equal feeling of devotion and reverence." 
Then follows a list of the books, including 
all of the Apocrypha, with an anathema 
on all who in the future shall not receive 
all the books as equally inspired scripture. 
Bishop Westcott says: "This fatal decree, 
in which the Council, harassed by the fear 
of lay critics and grammarians, gave a new 
aspect to the whole question of the canon, 
was ratified by fifty-three prelates, amongst 
whom there was not one German, not one 
scholar distinguished for historical learn- 
ing, not one who was fitted by special study 
107 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

of the subject in which the truth could only 
be determined by the voice of antiquity.'' 
A General Council of the Roman Church 
having made such a declaration, there is 
no way of recalling or going round it, but 
it must stand for all time as the position of 
that church. 

The attitude of the Greek Church has 
been wavering, inconstant, if not self- 
contradictory. The synods of Constanti- 
nople, Jaffa, and Jerusalem seem to approve 
the Apocrypha, while many of the leading 
scholars refuse to accept it, and the Longer 
Catechism of Philaret, which has official 
sanction, gives to all books outside of the 
twenty-two an inferior place, as meant for 
the reading of those just entering the 
church. The theory of the church seems 
to be expressed in this rule of the cate- 
chism, but its practice has been about as 
free and varied as though there had been 
no rule on the subject. 

The position of the Anglican Church has 
not been decidedly for or against the use of 
the Apocrypha, though it has consistently 
held that full inspiration belongs only to 
the canonical books. The Apocrypha is 
108 



THE APOCRYPHA 

sanctioned for ecclesiastical use, but it is 
not accepted as authority for doctrinal 
purposes. On certain days portions of it 
are read in the church lessons, but for edi- 
fication rather than for establishing doc- 
trine. In all her versions of the Scriptures, 
from Tyndale to the Authorized Version, 
the Apocrypha is printed by itself as an 
appendix to the Old Testament. 

All the Protestant churches stand on the 
ground held by the best scholars of all the 
ages of Christian history, that the books of 
the Apocrypha hold a subordinate position 
to the books of the sacred canon, are no part 
of it, and are to be read for edification and 
instruction and not for doctrine. 

Thus we find the Christian world divided 
into two camps, one opposed to the other 
on this question of what constitutes the 
Bible. Thus we are brought back to our 
fundamental position that inspiration is a 
perpetual thing in the Church of God, and 
that men do not come to the knowledge of 
God and of his will concerning them but 
by the Light of the Holy Spirit, whether 
they have or have not the Bible. The 
process of spiritual discrimination, applica- 
109 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

tion, and appropriation is still going on, 
and men must for themselves decide this 
fundamental question of the ages by choos- 
ing between the one canon and the other. 
Happily, the question is reduced to a form 
where great practical error is not possible, 
and the great message of God to men re- 
mains intact in either choice. The addition 
of the Apocrypha to the Bible brings in no 
new truth, nor does it take away any old 
truth. God's real Word remains unaffected 
by it. If with our Protestant Bible we 
should bind up Abraham Lincoln's Gettys- 
burg Speech, Epictetus on How a Man 
on Every Occasion Can Maintain His 
Proper Character, and Demosthenes's Ora- 
tion on the Crown, we would take nothing 
from and add nothing to God's great reve- 
lation to men. Some would find in these 
productions a real inspiration, as truly di- 
vine to them as anything in Esther or in 
the Song of Solomon, and in no way 
conflict with anything in the sacred canon. 
Practically, the exclusion or the inclusion 
of the Apocrypha is of little importance, 
for the great message of God to man is 
unaffected by it. 

110 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PRESENT STANDING OF 
THE BIBLE 

The Bible is now everywhere accepted 
by Christian believers as a revelation from 
God, teaching the truths of religion and 
the duties of life as no other book does. 
But it has not been so accepted because 
of the claims of the authors, nor yet be- 
cause of the faith of the people to whom 
the various books were written, but be- 
cause a living spiritual energy has gone 
forth from it, producing fruits that reveal 
the character of the tree. The ages have 
been full of pretended revelations, sanc- 
tioned by assumed miracles and visits of 
angels. Even in this most enlightened 
period of the world's history impostors 
boldly strut before the public, claiming to 
be sent of God to teach mankind the way 
of life. One of the latest of these has 
stolen and misappropriated to itself two of 
the most influential words in our modern 
life, for Christian Science is neither Chris- 
tian nor scientific; that is, it does not make 
Jesus Christ supreme as the Saviour of 
111 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

men, nor does it proceed according to the 
facts of human experience as testified to 
in all the course of history. Striking cases 
of the kind that have had large success 
through longer periods are Mohammedan- 
ism and Mormonism, but other equally 
fraudulent but less successful claims have 
been innumerable. A skillful artist can de- 
ceive "the very elect" in pretended mir- 
acles. The magicians of Egypt were able 
to match the miracles wrought by Moses 
up to a certain point. 

The acceptance of a revelation by an 
individual to whom it is made may be 
sufficiently warranted by attending cir- 
cumstances, but to prepare a book for 
general acceptance through long periods of 
time requires corroborating evidences that 
appeal to the cool judgment of mankind 
with convincing force. The Christian 
Scriptures were subjected to the learned 
criticism of the best scholars of the age 
when they were written. They were put 
on trial and tested in the practical ex- 
periences of life by thousands of people 
in all positions of life. All the thinkers, 
scholars, and preachers of the faith were 
112 



STANDING OF THE BIBLE 

set to work comparing them with the ac- 
cepted standards of religious belief and 
with their own religious consciousness, and 
no production found its way into the canon 
that had not successfully passed all of 
these tests of its genuineness and truth. 
In all these processes we assume what was 
promised by our Lord, that the Holy 
Ghost directed the course of thought in 
the church and led to such conclusions as 
were according to truth. 

The Bible is cordially accepted by the 
believers of this age as the Word of God, 
but it is conceded that the human element 
in it is large. It appears in the style of 
writing, in the expression of taste, temper, 
passion, national bias, and other peculiari- 
ties of the writers. Saint Paul looks at 
Christianity from the standpoint of the 
law, as a system of righteousness and sal- 
vation above law and yet not without law; 
Saint Peter views Christianity from the 
standpoint of fulfilled prophecy; and Saint 
James looks at it as a perfected system of 
ethics and practical precepts. The human 
element is everywhere in evidence, its 
weakness as well as its strength. 
113 



THE MAKING OP THE BIBLE 

The Word that was made flesh also 
presents this double aspect, "very God" 
and 'Very man." The human element 
was so pronounced that many could see 
only that, while his closest friends of most 
spiritual type fully recognized it and 
thought it no derogation from his deity 
that he ate fish and bread like other 
hungry men. His favorite title for des- 
ignating himself was "Son of man." As 
with the Word made flesh, so with the Word 
made literature, the human element, with 
common human limitations, is the visible, 
the outstanding feature that adapts it to 
human intelligence and makes the strong- 
est appeal to the human heart, yet is it 
the Word of God. It has many limitations 
that speak for themselves. 

Among these is incompleteness. It is in 
fragments, as though men became weary, 
or knew but a part, or had not time and 
other resources for writing fully. No 
writer completes his task. Saint Matthew 
omits very important utterances of the 
Lord reported by Saint Luke, and both 
fail to give some of the best things spoken 
by the Master, as reported by Saint John, 
114 



STANDING OF THE BIBLE 

and he declares in the closing verses of his 
Gospel that if he should record all the 
works and words of the Lord, "even the 
world itself could not contain the books 
that would be written." 

It was limited also by man's knowledge 
and capacity for understanding. This ac- 
counts for differing styles of writing, sweep 
of thought, depth of reasoning, and height 
of poetical genius in the different books of 
divine revelation. The revelation must be 
according to the capacity for understand- 
ing and expression of the person receiving 
it. The ablest teacher could not give in- 
struction in algebra to one who did not 
know the alphabet. The messages of God 
to men had to be adapted to their intelli- 
gence, the range of their vocabulary, their 
experience and capacity for spiritual un- 
derstanding. Therefore the Master said, "I 
have yet many things to say unto you, but 
ye cannot bear them now." They must 
learn more, experience more, and rise to a 
higher plane of life before they could be fit- 
ted to receive the revelation he had to make. 

A good illustration of this principle is in 
the use of the word "holy," or "holiness." 
115 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

It was a thousand years before Israel came 
to understand that word, and only then 
by a careful education by sprinklings, wash- 
ings, and ceremonials emphasizing the idea 
of cleanness and purity. There was abso- 
lutely no conception or knowledge of such 
a character as that word was intended to 
represent outside of Hebrew literature; 
there were no examples, no standards, and 
no etymology to guide the understanding. 
The early Hebrew idea of the word seems 
to have been that of unapproachableness. 
The same appears in the kindred word of 
"righteousness" as used in Hebrew litera- 
ture. The high ethical meaning of that 
word did not appear till the later prophets 
of Israel turned their searchlights upon it. 
Revelation must, therefore, be given with 
reference to man's vocabulary and range of 
spiritual understanding, unless it is in- 
tended, as in the case of the words just cited, 
to follow the revelation with a long process 
of education to make its meaning clear. 

It was limited also by its mechanical 

equipment. It was given before the age of 

printing and paper-making, and after the 

revelation was made its existence was very 

116 



STANDING OF THE BIBLE 

precarious and its preservation in accurate 
form very doubtful. It was written for 
the most part on papyrus, a frail and un- 
reliable substance made of layers of the 
pith out of the stock of a growing plant, 
pressed together, polished, and cut into 
sheets from six to eighteen inches wide 
and of any length required. Parchment 
was too costly for as poor a people as most 
of the early Christians were. If the sheets 
of papyrus became damp, they contracted 
mildew and the writing became illegible; 
and if they were thoroughly dry, they be- 
came brittle and were easily broken and 
crumbled. It is easy to see that being 
often unrolled, loaned from one individual 
to another, and carried from one church to 
another to be read in the services and 
examined by many curious people or ad- 
mirers of the author, there would be great 
danger of deterioration and loss. We have 
but to think out the circumstances attend- 
ing any one of these manuscripts to see the 
danger to which they were exposed. Take 
the case of Saint Paul's Epistle to the 
Romans. If it was carried to Rome by 
Phoebe, as it probably was, her arrival in 
117 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Rome with such a document would be one 
of the most sensational events of the age. 
The next Sabbath there would not be 
standing room in the church where the 
epistle would be read, and many eager 
eyes must be permitted to look upon it. 
Every congregation and group of wor- 
shipers must have it, or some part of it 
read, and that oftentimes. Then there 
would be requests to loan it to nearby cities 
to be read in many assemblies. A frail 
fabric handled thus, often by unskilled 
hands, must soon suffer in the process. 
One striking illustration of this liability to 
breakage and the loss of fragments appears 
in the Gospel of Mark. Scholars are quite 
agreed that such a break occurred at the 
eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter. Any- 
one reading that chapter will note the sud- 
den stoppage of the continuous account of 
the resurrection, and the place of the frag- 
ment broken away is filled in by discon- 
nected passages from some other source, 
possibly from memory on the same subject. 
The copying of these manuscripts was 
very unreliable. Anyone who has ever 
carried a manuscript through our more 
118 



STANDING OF THE BIBLE 

improved methods to publication knows 
how difficult it is to avoid mistakes. After 
the greatest care by typesetter, proof 
reader, and author going over it again 
and again, most unaccountable errors creep 
in. A man employed to copy one of these 
Gospel manuscripts would do his work 
alone, in a hot climate, and it would 
hardly be possible for him to execute his 
task without omitting or inserting, or sub- 
stituting a wrong word. Few people can 
copy even a list of names of any con- 
siderable length without making mistakes. 

Another limitation is in the break of 
continuity. Not one of the original manu- 
scripts of that early apostolic age has come 
down to us. We have only copies and 
translations. But there is a great mass of 
evidence to show that if they are not 
technically exact copies they are vitally and 
practically the same as the originals. 

Some minds are disturbed by discovering 
little inaccuracies and errors in our received 
versions in matters that do not affect the 
vital theme or essential contents of the 
revelation. Some minds are naturally tech- 
nical and given to quibbling, while others 
119 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

hold unwarranted theories of divine in- 
spiration that are disturbed by discovering 
these errors. It would be foreign to the 
purpose of this writing to give a list of 
these errors; they are so many and so 
palpable that no careful reader can pass 
over them without observing them. The 
various translations differ widely in ver- 
biage, and they cannot all be the exact 
words in which the revelation was given 
at the first. And if we admit any depar- 
tures from the exact original, we have no 
means of determining how far they may 
have gone. But these lingual errors do 
not affect the great substance of the mes- 
sage; the way of salvation and the will of 
God concerning human conduct shine out 
clearly through all the encumbering limita- 
tions of the human element of style and 
stumbling utterance. If our Revised Ver- 
sion is without error as the very Word of 
God in phraseology as well as in substance, 
then our fathers had a Bible in which were 
many errors, as anyone may see by com- 
paring the fifth of First John and the third 
of Saint James, as well as other scriptures 
in the Authorized and Revised Versions. 
120 



STANDING OF THE BIBLE 

This condition of the revelation har- 
monizes with what was said earlier in 
this discussion to the effect that nothing 
could be more fatal to human development, 
spiritual as well as intellectual, than an 
exact methodical revelation, in which every 
word was just as God uttered it and in 
which every duty of life was clearly stated, 
so that a man would never have anything 
more to do than to pull out his schedule 
to determine just what he ought to do. 
This would paralyze the intellect and dwarf 
the soul by removing the necessity for 
effort. The mind needs the spur of rea- 
sonable doubt, and the necessity for la- 
borious and prolonged investigation for dis- 
entangling complex and obscure conditions. 
For man's good the truth must be placed 
where sincerity of purpose, honesty of 
method, earnestness of effort, and prayer 
for divine help are necessary to attain it. 
This becomes an educating, developing 
process that may be of more value to the 
soul than the truth itself. He is not a wise 
father who hands out to his children as 
their needs require without exacting pro- 
ductive and creative energy and skill on 
121 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

their part, for he thus holds them forever 
in an infantile state. The mother eagle 
chooses between nurslings and eagles, and 
because she prefers eagles she flings her 
young out of the nest and compels them to 
beat the air wildly to save their lives till 
they learn to mount and soar skyward. 

God has placed all his gifts along the 
pathway of heroic effort. Man must learn 
by strenuous toil how to build a handful 
of dust into growing and ripening grain, 
how to transform that into a baked loaf, 
and how with that to build living tissues 
and brain cells out of which, by heroic 
effort, he can project his Iliad, his Divina 
Commedia, or his Paradise Lost. He 
thanks God for the gift of gold, but he 
does not find gold dollars rolling down his 
streets, but he must penetrate the frozen 
Klondike, search long and climb till he 
grows dizzy to find above the timber line, 
carefully disguised and locked up in the 
flinty quartz, God's great gift to man, 
which he must dig, explode, crush, and 
mint before he can use. God's best 
gifts are in some such form. The great 
vital thing in truth-getting is the hunger 
122 



STANDING OP THE BIBLE 

of soul that longs for it, the heroic effort 
that moves toward it, the kindling vision 
that discloses it, and the lifting up of the 
soul to God that finds him and in him 
finds the truth and so is satisfied. If God 
were to give us a revelation that would 
save us this effort and its resulting discip- 
line and development, it would be a posi- 
tive injury to men. Jacob wrestling in 
doubt and fear all night at the brook 
Jabbok was a far better method for his 
highest good than it would have been 
to send a convoy of angels the day 
before to assure him of safety. There is 
no better method of proving and develop- 
ing sincerity, honesty, and devotion in 
men, and of driving them to God in prayer 
for the promised teaching and guidance of 
the Holy Spirit, than the necessity of 
grappling with all these questions raised 
by modern criticism, for which the way 
seems to have been left open. In this 
search for the truth the souls of men 
must be held in a prayerful mood and in 
vital relation to the Divine Spirit whose 
office is to guide us "into all truth/ 5 the 
truth that "shall make us free indeed." 
123 



CHAPTER IX 

THE BIBLE THE CREATURE OF 
EXPERIENCE 

The divine method of revelation was to 
lift one man into a new atmosphere, per- 
meate and enswathe him with truth and 
spiritual influence, and to quicken his soul 
till he had the power of vision and a 
kindled enthusiasm for declaring the truth 
as he saw it. Truth was not dropped into 
the mind as an abstract proposition, but it 
came in by the way of experience as a 
concrete fact, demonstrated as to its reality 
by experience. A man must first become 
the truth, see and feel the truth; then 
may he prophesy, and not till then. It 
means something more than intellectual 
cognition, something deeper, more satisfy- 
ing, and more assuring. The word of the 
Lord must always come out of "the burn- 
ing bush," the supernatural equipment, 
illumination, and empowering of a man 
given over to the service of God. Espe- 
cially must this be so for the written reve- 
124 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

lation, intended for the instruction of all 
ages, that there may be no error, no lack, 
and no extravagance. It is the office of 
the Divine Spirit to charge the human 
mind with his thoughts and affections, and 
to assist it in their adequate expression. 

This element of experience in divine 
things as the necessary channel of di- 
vine revelation is clearly manifested in the 
first writer of our sacred books. When 
the time came for beginning the formal 
development of God's purposes to Israel, 
a special person was selected as instrument, 
teacher, and leader. The childhood of 
Moses was sufficiently marked by special 
providences and striking events to raise 
among his people the highest expectations 
for his after life. He must have known 
these facts and been stimulated by them 
in his education in the universities of 
Egypt. 

When at the age of forty he came to a 
consciousness of his divine vocation as de- 
liverer and leader of Israel, a little pre- 
cipitation and lack of prudence threw him 
back on a long course of discipline that 
would have crushed a less resolute man. 
125 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

With the charge of murder and treason 
hanging over him, he must hide himself 
in the far-away solitudes of Midian. A 
university man of splendid abilities, tend- 
ing sheep in mountain wilds for forty 
years, would be a humiliation and dwarf- 
ing experience that would have broken or 
shriveled up a nature of less inherent 
greatness. His life seemed a failure, his 
career ended, his conscious vocation a de- 
lusion when, at the age of eighty, came 
the stirring call to heroic action, a call so 
illumined and vitalized by attending divine 
manifestations that it could not be set 
aside. Then followed the ten plagues, the 
pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night 
on the outward march, the dividing sea 
and the falling manna, Sinai and its reve- 
lations, angel leadership and the vision of 
God's glory. Then out of all this investi- 
ture of divine manifestation and wonderful 
experiences came the voice of a man, a 
man charged and packed full of these great 
events which were translated into thought 
and speech in him. They became his very 
life, and he spoke what he was, what he 
saw and felt under their molding influence. 
126 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

All that he wrote was but the record of his 
experience, and of all that came to him 
and out of him through these experiences. 
He was that "burning bush" held aloft in 
all his leadership of the people, giving forth 
light and speech from the flame that did 
not consume but glorified that upon which 
it fed. 

If we come to the patriarch of Uz, the 
central figure in that drama of truth that 
has instructed and comforted so many, we 
find experience the substance, the ruling 
idea of the book, turned over and worked 
out in all the details of a wonderful teach- 
ing drama. A man stricken with loss of 
children, property, health, and sorely per- 
plexed in mind about these experiences and 
their cause is visited by his friends, who 
assume to be his comforters. They at- 
tempt to apply to him the untrue but 
prevalent theory of the times that physical 
well-being was proof of divine favor and 
the loss of it evidence of divine anger be- 
cause of some sin. They pressed him to 
make confession, to declare his sin and thus 
seek the favor of God, that he might be 
restored to prosperity. Daily disputing 
127 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

with these misguided friends, worn out by 
loss, suffering, and broken health, Job is 
down where the flame of life barely flickers 
in its socket. When there are no deeper 
depths of distress to which he may descend, 
Job is commanded to "pray for his friends," 
who had vexed and tormented him by false 
insinuations in the time of his great suf- 
fering. Rising to the moral height of this 
requirement, forgetting his own griefs, in a 
vicarious supplication like that on Calvary, 
he stretched out his hands of skin and bone 
toward heaven, and while he poured out 
his soul to God in prayer for his misguided 
friends, thus reaching perfection's height, 
the light fell over him and the account is, 
"The Lord turned the captivity of Job, 
when he prayed for his friends." It is a 
drama of wonderful experiences, luminous 
with truth and instructive to all ages by 
his experiences and through them. It is 
the experience that infolds and gives out 
the light that is in the book, and from the 
first it speaks of and to experience. 

If we move forward along the track of 
history to the great source of the psalmody 
and spiritual literature of the Hebrews, we 
128 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

find everywhere the "living waters" flow- 
ing from the smitten rock of experience. 
The poet king who gave the Hebrew peo- 
ple their first great spiritual inspiration and 
uplift was thoroughly disciplined and de- 
veloped in the school of experience, and his 
highest poetical flights were the declaration 
of his own states of mind or experience. 
His boyhood training as a shepherd de- 
veloped in him what became the ruling idea 
of his life, the duty and necessity of caring 
for others; and in a country where there 
were no universities it was one of the best 
possible trainings for kingship. 

While yet a lad he heard the living God 
and the armies of Israel defied by the 
braggart Philistine giant and felt his na- 
ture stirred to its profoundest depths and 
his faith put to its utmost test. Then first 
there came into his nature a thrilling con- 
sciousness of power, as it has come to many 
another lad on occasion, and he felt that 
all Israel was in some way represented in 
him and that he stood in defense of the 
glory and honor of Jehovah. In that con- 
sciousness the hero emerges and the shep- 
herd boy drops out of sight. After that he 
129 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

came into the experience of a great love 
and a bitter hate. Jonathan loved him, as 
hardly any other man has loved another, 
and Saul hated him with a wild, cruel, irra- 
tional hate that would be appeased by 
nothing less than the death of its object. 
But standing there over the sleeping form 
of his enemy, with his drawn sword in his 
hand, he cut away only the skirt of the 
king's robe which he afterward displayed 
as proof of a magnanimity like that of the 
prayer of Calvary by the Master for his 
crucifiers. Afterward, with a sad break in 
his own moral integrity, followed by bitter 
penitence and spiritual restoration, he 
learned in himself the frailty of human 
nature. 

To these educating and developing ex- 
periences that fitted him so admirably for 
speaking out the truth most needful to 
men was to be added in his old age the 
heartbreaking anguish of rebellion in his 
own family. He was driven out of Jeru- 
salem and across the Kidron, derided by 
some of his own subjects, and found retreat 
in the wilderness across the Jordan. The 
ambitious Absalom pursued him with an 
130 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

army, and when the battle was joined, the 
king sat in the gate waiting for tidings. 
When one came saying, "All the king's 
enemies be as that young man Absalom 
is," then the king turned away and went 
up to his chamber lamenting as he went, 
"O my son Absalom, my son, my son 
Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, 
O Absalom, my son, my son!" 

All these thrilling experiences were 
breathed forth by this tuneful and poetic 
nature in the psalms that have been the 
voice of the Lord to the souls of men 
through all these centuries because they fit 
human experiences so perfectly, so evi- 
dently the word of God to some soul in its 
deepest experiences reproduced and ex- 
pressed for the instruction and comfort of 
all souls. The things that he had ex- 
periencecj developed, clarified, and spirit- 
ualized his thought, and became the 
repertory on which to draw, under divine 
guidance, for the instruction of others. We 
read what he says with our eyes on his 
experiences, and interpret the one by the 
other. 

It is equally true of the great "evan- 
131 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

gelical prophet of Israel" that he came to 
his visions of the truth by the way of 
experience. Isaiah says, "In the year that 
King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord 
sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up." 
In that vision there came to him an over- 
whelming sense of his sinfulness, and he 
poured out confessions and self-reproaches 
till an angel came with a coal of fire from 
the altar and laid it upon his lips and de- 
clared that his inquity was purged away. 
Then, with a new light and a new life, he 
began those wonderful utterances, made 
possible by fire-tipped and fire-purified lips, 
that have been for the comfort and instruc- 
tion of the church to this day. The ex- 
perience antedated and was the channel of 
the revelations, of the high sense of right- 
eousness, of the fine ethical sense, and of 
the vision of the coming Christ that ap- 
pear on all his pages. The light of that 
first vision illuminated the whole universe 
of truth and flung its light far out along 
the pathway on which men are traveling. 
But for that experience the voice of Isaiah 
would probably not have been heard be- 
yond his own age, and his message will 
132 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

hardly be understood but by the way of a 
similar experience. Truth lies in strata, 
moves in levels, and to understand it one 
must rise to it, strike its vein, and follow 
its bent. 

The prophet Ezekiel was not less depend- 
ent upon the vehicle of experience in the 
revelations that came to him and through 
him to the world than were the other Old 
Testament writers. His first educating ex- 
perience was the deep pain and humiliation 
of a captive in a strange land. This no 
doubt drove him to earnest prayerfulness 
and searching inquiry into the ways of the 
Lord with his people. Then rose before 
him that wonderful spectacle of the four 
living creatures — the wheels and wheels 
within wheels, full of eyes, the infolding 
fire, and the moving power that proceeded 
in straight lines. This burning fire, the 
seeing eyes, rolling wheels, and straight 
movements come to expression and exposi- 
tion in the subsequent words of the 
prophet. This experience, and all else fol- 
lows naturally. 

If we come to the New Testament, we 
find there also experience going before 
133 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

teaching and furnishing the material for it. 
The apostle Paul had one great experience 
that changed, illuminated, and empowered 
his whole life and gave character and sub- 
stance to all his thinking. He rose into a 
new realm of truth by experience, and he 
lived, worked, wrote, and fought on the 
facts of that experience. For forty years 
of wonderful ministry that was his constant 
appeal; whether before the mob in Jerusa- 
lem or before King Agrippa, everywhere 
and always he recounted that experience 
as his defense and as the explanation of 
his life. The Christology of Saint Paul, 
the most pronounced and glowing doctrinal 
feature of the New Testament, was de- 
veloped out of that experience. We read 
those wonderful passages in Romans, Ephe- 
sians, and Colossians, in which the Lord- 
ship and redeeming glory of Jesus Christ 
are stated with such ability and beauty of 
phrase, looking all the time at that Damas- 
cus experience as the germinal source of it 
all. Out of this Christology of Saint Paul 
rose his doctrine of sin and grace, and out 
of that his doctrine of law and faith. Not 
only do his doctrines come out of that 
134 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

experience, but the moral and spiritual 
forces of his life have the same origin. 
With such a vision of the power and glory 
of Jesus Christ as came to him, there never 
could be lack of courage, faith, abounding 
cheerfulness, or overflowing love. That 
experience contained the germ of all doc- 
trine, personal devotion, ministerial fidel- 
ity, missionary impulse, and hopeful out- 
look to the future. How could he fear 
shipwreck, prisons, scourgings, persecu- 
tions, or any possible ills after such an 
experience? And was it not perfectly logi- 
cal for him to send down the ages the 
ringing challenge, 'TEfcejoice in the Lord al- 
way: and again I say, Rejoice"? 

Saint Peter's writing and preaching, so 
far as reported, is a reproduction of what he 
saw, heard, and experienced. When insist- 
ing that the faith he held was not "cun- 
ningly devised fables," he supports the as- 
sertion by declaring that he and his fellow 
disciples "were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 
For he received from God the Father honor 
and glory, when there came such a voice 
to him from the excellent glory, This is my 
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. 
135 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

And this voice which came from heaven we 
heard, when we were with him in the holy 
mount." This is the substance of all apos- 
tolical teaching — the report and exposition 
of the various experiences through which 
they passed in association with Christ or 
in the prosecution of his work after his 
ascension. The Acts of the Apostles is but 
a record of miracles, of the works connected 
with them, and of the truths illustrated 
and confirmed by them. Instead of the 
Acts of the Apostles, it would be nearer 
the actual facts to call it "The Dynamics 
of the Holy Spirit." It is a book of ex- 
periences with their doctrinal implications. 

This is a close adherence to the strict 
scientific method: first the fact, then the 
theory or doctrine derived from it. But 
always the fact is the basal, the determin- 
ing thing, and the doctrine the necessary 
logical conclusion from the fact. In con- 
nection with the experience revelations 
were made that reached out into the future 
or into realms of truth beyond the range 
of experience, but in natural line with it, 
deducible from it, and confirmed by it. 

As revelation came to us by the way of 
136 



THE CREATURE OF EXPERIENCE 

experience, and moves on that plane, so is 
it understood only in the light of ex- 
perience. We must rise to its level if we 
would catch its spirit and deepest mean- 
ing. One must have musical taste and 
culture to appreciate the best music; only 
artistic taste — that is, a mind conscious of 
the beauties of art — can appreciate a mas- 
terpiece; literary taste and culture are 
necessary for the understanding and ap- 
preciation of the best literature; so is a 
spiritual nature, developed by spiritual ex- 
periences, necessary to the understanding 
of revelation. This manifest fact in our 
intellectual life is clearly stated by Saint 
Paul when he says: "But the natural man 
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of 
God: for they are foolishness unto him: 
neither can he know them, because they 
are spiritually discerned." Therefore to re- 
ceive the revelation properly requires the 
same spiritual elevation that is necessary 
in making it, which brings us again to the 
proposition stated before in this discussion, 
that inspiration by the Holy Ghost is the 
perpetual need and privilege of believers, 
as it is the promised office and work of the 
137 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Divine Spirit. As in wireless telegraphy 
the receiving station must be constructed 
and equipped as the transmitting station is, 
so they that receive must be in the same 
spiritual condition as they who transmit 
the revelation. 



138 



CHAPTER X 

THE BIBLE TESTED BY 
EXPERIENCE 

This is a fair test, just to the book, re- 
liable and scientific in character, and satis- 
fying to the thinking mind. If it was sent 
forth by God, the embodiment of infinite 
wisdom, adapted to the human race by 
the maker of it, and designed for a certain 
purpose by Him who rules all things, then 
we have a right to expect two things of it: 
first, that there will be in it a working 
energy that will persist and hold to its 
purpose till its work is done; and, second, 
that it will be found to fit into existing con- 
ditions and to work toward a general 
betterment. 

If it came forth from God and has in it 
the life and thought of God, its system of 
truth should be reasonably satisfying to the 
most learned minds, its standard of ethics 
should be the best known, its curative and 
corrective methods for human frailties and 
weaknesses should be the most effective, 
139 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

its motives to worthy conduct the most 
moving, its rewards to virtue the most 
engaging, its supports under trial the great- 
est, its outlook for hope the brightest, its 
grounds for confidence the strongest, its 
aids to love the most creative and helpful, 
its regenerating power by the Holy Spirit 
the most effective, and in all ways it 
should prove itself an adequate corrective 
of human perversity and an abundant 
supply for human need. If God sent it into 
the world, putting his personality into it 
and back of it, so that he could say of his 
Word, "It shall not return unto me void, 
but it shall accomplish that which I please, 
and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I 
send it," then we shall be justified in look- 
ing for results corresponding to this high 
ideal. Does it accomplish what it pro- 
poses? Is it effective in the thing it under- 
takes? Does it live up to contract? These 
questions naturally suggest themselves, we 
have a right to ask them, and the author 
of the revelation invites us to consider 
them. 

This is the scientific method, settling 
questions by facts. The final, the unan- 
140 






TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

swerable appeal is to facts; they must 
stand; they will stand, inveigh against 
them as we may. When the question of 
propelling cars by steam was under dis- 
cussion it was said in the British Parlia- 
ment that it would be impossible, for a 
speed of twenty miles an hour would take 
away one's breath. But this seemingly 
conclusive argument lost all its force when 
the great trains between London and Edin- 
burgh began running more than forty miles 
an hour. Men sneered at the proposition 
of an Atlantic cable, but when Queen Vic- 
toria and the President of the United States 
exchanged congratulations under the ocean 
the argument was closed. Facts crash 
through theories, overturn and remake 
them. Facts of experience are the final, 
the unanswerable arguments, and by them 
the Bible must stand or fall. Life is more 
than logic, experience more than philos- 
ophy, and fact more than theory. 

The Bible came into the world to teach, 
regenerate by the Holy Spirit, and de- 
velop human beings. It was thrown into a 
swirling mass of contending forces to mas- 
ter, guide, and unify them for the uplifting 
141 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

of men. In this work it encountered great 
opposition from the very first. Its message 
was uncompromising, insistent upon new 
and unwelcome ideals, condemnatory of 
much that was highly prized, and hostile 
to the prevailing order of things. If not 
revolutionary, it was so radical and uncom- 
promising in its teaching that it tended 
toward a world-wide overturning and re- 
adjustment. The ambitions, passions, and 
lusts of men everywhere combined against 
it; rulers were afraid of it, and the common 
people hated it because it interfered with 
their pleasures. The burning of, the roll of 
Jeremiah's message by the king of Judah 
was but a type of that spirit of opposition 
that has antagonized every stage of the 
unfolding revelation. 

This, then, is its first practical test, the 
opposition of its enemies. This proved its 
quality, its power of endurance and of 
recuperation, and the reality of a divine 
superintendence over its course. It is the 
kind of proof the battleship is subject to 
when the forts pour their rain of shells upon 
it; if it comes unharmed out of that trial, 
we need no other proof of its quality. 
142 



TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

The Bible has survived the opposition of 
many of the keenest intellects and best 
scholars of the various ages of its history. 
Evil-minded men have employed all the 
resources of their great learning and in- 
genuity to discredit its claims and to dis- 
pute its authority. The first appearance 
of the sacred books, the Word in literature, 
was greeted with as much skepticism and 
opposition as were manifested against the 
"Word made flesh," and they were sup- 
ported by much more learning and intel- 
lectual ability than were employed in the 
effort to discredit Jesus Christ. No keener 
intellect ever entered the field of contro- 
versy than was employed by Celsus in the 
second century in his efforts to discredit 
the Scriptures, and many of his colaborers 
in this undertaking were men of great 
ability and varied learning. Hardly any- 
thing new has been said against the Scrip- 
tures since that first and fierce assault. 
Many of the propositions of "modern 
doubt,' 5 "advanced thought," "new theol- 
ogy*" or "latest scientific thought" are 
simply unexploded shells picked up from 
that old battlefield. That early period, on 
143 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

to the fifth century, remains unsurpassed 
for the brilliant scholarship and the keen 
intellects employed both in the attack and 
in the defense of the Holy Scriptures. The 
Bible came forth from this trial by fire of 
the intellect clearer and stronger in its 
grip upon the minds of men than it had 
ever been before. 

Then followed the trial by rude force. 
If men could not overcome the Bible by 
reason, they could at least strike it down 
with the bludgeon of rude force. The 
whole force of the Roman army, then su- 
preme throughout the world, was em- 
ployed to put the Bible out of existence. 
During the period of the great ten perse- 
cutions (64-303) three objects were con- 
stantly aimed at — the suppression of public 
worship, the destruction of the individual 
believer, and the wiping out of the Holy 
Scriptures. Diligent search was made for 
copies of the hated book, a world-wide 
campaign was set on foot for its utter 
extirpation, and no means of torture were 
left untried to force confession of where it 
was being concealed. Many brave men 
laid down their lives rather than surrender 
144 



TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

the Holy Scriptures to the destroyers, 
others resorted to various devices to con- 
ceal and preserve the book of their faith. 
The great church historian Eusebius says 
of this period of persecution, "I saw with 
my own eyes the houses of prayer thrown 
down and razed to their foundations and 
the inspired and Sacred Scriptures con- 
signed to the fire in the open market 
place." But He who had declared that 
"the word of God liveth and abideth for- 
ever" kept "watch and ward over his 
own/' and in proof of its divine origin and 
protection the Bible came forth from this 
fierce storm of wrath to regain all it had 
lost and to spread to the uttermost parts 
of the earth. 

We now pass over a long period of time 
in which were various forms of opposition 
to the Bible to mention the most formal 
and formidable attack of atheism. A short 
method in logic would be to prove that 
there was no personal God, then, of course, 
there could be no divine revelation. This 
form of opposition rose to its highest de- 
velopment among the French Encyclo- 
paedists during the eighteenth century. 
145 



[HE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Among the great scholars and writers who 
united in this movement were Voltaire, 
Diderot, Rousseau, and others who brought 
great literary skill to the support of their 
undertaking. The Bible was ridiculed, 
sneered at, buffeted, and sent to the cross, 
only to come forth again in a glorious 
resurrection as the kindling rays of the 
English Reformation lighted up the dawn 
of a new day, giving further proof of the 
divine life that forever abides in it. 

Another form of attack upon the Word 
of God was in the negations and destruc- 
tive criticism of the English deists, who 
flourished about the time of the French 
Encyclopaedists, and whom they rivaled in 
learning and intellectual ability. Among 
these may be named such brilliant writers 
as Gibbon, Bolingbrook, Hume, and others 
who have brought honor to English letters 
and glory to the Word of God by leaving 
it unharmed after their able attacks upon 
it. About this time, and apparently as the 
divine answer to these attacks, a young 
Oxford student reading his Greek Testa- 
ment received such an impulse and uplift 
from it that he went out and shook the 
146 



TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

nations with the power of his word, till 
men everywhere were roused to a new 
faith in the Bible and to a new application 
of its teachings to the regulation of their 
conduct. All forms of attack upon the 
book have recoiled upon their authors, leav- 
ing it stronger in its hold upon the human 
mind than before. All this looks very 
much as though it was given by One 
who knew perfectly its power of endurance 
and recuperation and the spiritual forces 
that were to come into it and attend it, as 
well as the limitations of all forms of attack 
that could possibly be made, and who fore- 
saw that it was to go on increasing in power 
and influence till the whole world was filled 
with its light and truth. After all the 
attacks upon it this old book is the young- 
est and freshest thing of our literature if 
we are to judge by that fairly good rule, 
"the best seller." In all the markets of 
the world men are asking for what has 
proved itself to be "the bread of life" with 
increasing eagerness. 

In this test of experience we must also 
consider the verdict of those who having 
accepted the Bible in good faith as the 
147 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

Word of God have been proving it in the 
experiences of life. It is a fair question to 
ask whether it has proven itself workable, 
adequate, reliable, and suitable to human 
needs. The proof of a medicine is in the 
cures it effects, of a machine in the work 
it does, and of a religion in the character 
it creates and maintains. This book, when 
its teachings are accepted and embodied in 
experience, shows the thief made honest, 
the drunkard made sober, the licentious 
made clean, savage tribes raised to civilized 
nations, civilized nations becoming mis- 
sionary, and all virtues stimulated and 
strengthened. This is proof that it fits 
human conditions, that it was given by 
One who perfectly understood these con- 
ditions and how to deal with them, and 
who was good enough to provide the best 
things for men. If for a machine that runs 
badly or tends toward self-destruction 
when driven to action, an adjustment is 
provided that corrects its fault, it will 
be acknowledged to be the work of the 
maker of the machine, or of some one 
equal to him in understanding. This is 
the conclusion we arrive at concerning the 
148 



TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

Bible: that because it has proven adequate 
for all man's needs, in every land and age, 
and in every grade of culture and wealth, 
therefore it must have been given by his 
Maker who perfectly understood the pos- 
sibilities of his life. The Magdalenes fol- 
lowed it, and it led them to pure and 
beautiful womanhood. The prodigals fol- 
lowed it, and it turned their steps to their 
Father's house, to the fatted calf and the 
new robe. The poor man accepted it, and 
he became conscious of his worth and 
dignity as the child of a King with a great 
inheritance waiting for him. The venerable 
pilgrim, nearing the end of his journey, 
walked in its light and saw, to his great 
joy, that he was just at the beginning of 
an endless life. It came to the man vexed 
with doubt and fear and gave him peace, 
to the sorrowing and gave comfort, to the 
dying and took from death its sting, and 
over the whole of life it spread the pro- 
tecting canopy of God's everlasting mercy. 
The Bible proves itself by enduring the 
test of growing knowledge and culture. At 
the end of three thousand years of mar- 
velous development we still find the Bible 
149 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 



leading the van as the most trusted teacher 
and guide of the race. It has not yet been 
superseded, nor has its light grown dim 
amid the splendors of the day in which we 
live. This could not have been the case 
had it been the product of the human 
mind only. It is proof of divine origin, 
that coming into the world in a dark age 
and among a people not remarkable for 
intellectual culture, its teachings still tran- 
scend all that the brightest intellects have 
been able to produce in a long period of 
wonderful growth in knowledge. 

In the portrayal of the divine character 
it takes a position so far above and apart 
from all other human literature as to pre- 
clude the idea of invention. The Greek 
Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, or all the gods of 
the nations with the best qualities in each 
combined into one conception of Deity 
fall so far below the Hebrew Jehovah or 
the Christian Jesus Christ as to force the 
conviction that the Bible conception was a 
gift of inspiration. In all the advanced 
culture of which our age may justly boast 
not one line has been added to or taken 
from that conception, nor has anything 
150 



TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

larger or better or equally good entered 
into the thought of men. Far above all 
our thinking rises strong, clear, pure, and 
unapproachable the biblical ideal of the 
Divine Being, as a vision that came down 
from heaven and broods over the earth 
as a lifegiving and sanctifying revelation. 
Not only in the ideal of divinity, but 
also in the ideal morality for men the 
biblical conception rises far above every 
other. The best modern thinking, unless 
formed after its models, does not approach 
it in excellence of quality. In the field of 
ethics Plato, with whom Socrates and Aris- 
totle practically agree, named four elements 
as comprehending his thought on the sub- 
ject. They were: (1) Wisdom, (2) Cour- 
age, or fortitude, (3) Temperance, or order- 
liness, (4) Justice, or uprightness. There 
was no recognition of benevolence or of 
good will toward men in that early philos- 
ophy, nor did it occur to them to arrive at 
good morals by the way of a clean heart 
or a right spirit. The inward state, the 
source of all character, did not come within 
the scope of their thinking. The ethics of 
the Bible so far surpass all man's thinking, 
151 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

both ancient and modern, that it is evident 
man did not formulate its teaching. 

The Bible has been tested in the spiritual 
realm with similar results. The keenest 
intellects have found nothing to be added 
and nothing to be taken from the funda- 
mental, all-inclusive law, "Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with 
all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and 
with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as 
thyself." The very announcement of it 
staggers the brain and dazzles the eyes; 
it is too high for human thought to climb 
to it; the mind of man never could have 
produced it without so marring it in the 
process as to render it other than what it 
is. Let a man sit down and try to think 
of something higher than this, to write out 
something that will equal or surpass it, and 
he will feel the truth of what we are saying 
about it. So far as we can see, it is not 
possible for any intelligence to conceive or 
express anything higher or better than that 
law. 

In its practical teaching the same supe- 
riority to all human systems for regulating 
and ordering human conduct appears. In 
152 



TESTED BY EXPERIENCE 

all the ways of testing to which the Bible 
has been subjected in human experience it 
proves itself more than human, that it is 
manifestly of divine origin. 



153 



CHAPTER XI 

THE BIBLE AMENABLE TO 
CRITICISM 

Criticism is the natural impulse, right, 
and duty of the intelligent mind, and no 
considerations of prudence, authority, or 
mock reverence can work the forfeiture of 
that right. No one can look upon the 
Parthenon or the temple of Theseus in 
Athens without at once raising the ques- 
tions, "When was this building erected, by 
whom, and for what purpose?" The an- 
swer that his questions would evoke would 
at once be subjected to the keenest scru- 
tiny of his best intelligence, unless he was 
ready to admit that his open-eyed wonder 
was too primitive and dull to generate 
thinking energy. Anything that claims 
antiquity or special authorship starts and 
justifies the question of the correctness of 
the claim, and must furnish proofs. A 
document that claims a certain date and 
authorship thereby eliminates every other, 
and so opens the door and invites to dis- 
154 



AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 

cussion. There is no question whether a 
man ought to use his intelligence in criti- 
cizing, since he is so made that he must 
do it, or decapitate his own intelligence. 

All thoughtful readers of the Bible may 
be classed as higher critics, for higher 
criticism is simply the consideration of 
these questions of date and authorship. 
The readers who find no occasion to de- 
part from the traditional view are as truly 
higher critics as those who reject that 
view. Higher criticism is not a certain 
result, but a process that may and does 
lead to very different, and sometimes to 
directly opposite, results. In some cases 
the best scholarship finds for the traditional 
view; in other cases the findings are against 
that view; and this illustrates the peculiar 
difficulties of the field in which these dis- 
cussions lie. 

We cannot seriously consider the books 
of the Bible at all till we have come to 
some conclusions about these fundamental 
questions of their origin and authority. 
The five books of Moses give no hint of 
who was their author or when they were 
written, therefore the door is left open for 
155 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

these questions to march in, and they will 
come in with or without our choice. The 
book of Joshua and the book of Judges 
name no one as author, nor do they claim 
any date as the time of their appearing — 
these are open questions. First and Sec- 
ond Samuel, First and Second Kings, First 
and Second Chronicles, Ruth, Job, and 
many other books lay no claims to any 
particular authorship or time of produc- 
tion. If there are any unwritten traditions 
about these things, we naturally wish to 
know what they are and on what grounds 
they make their appeal to our confidence. 
The degree of interest we feel in the con- 
tents of these books will measure the 
degree of the interest we feel in these 
questions. 

This impulse of the mind toward criti- 
cism is not specially manifested toward the 
books of the Bible or the institutions of 
religion, though because of their import- 
ance it may attract more attention here 
than in other fields of its operation. It 
applies to all the products of human energy 
and skill, to secular as well as to sacred 
literature, to art, to music, to architecture, 
156 



AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 

to war — in fact, it is as wide as the creative 
activities of the race. Those who imagine 
that it is something invented and em- 
ployed especially to discredit religion and 
its institutions have a very insufficient view 
of the facts. The real critic, like the real 
scientist, is concerned only to know the 
facts without regard to what theories they 
will support or discredit. Whether it con- 
cerns the authorship of Homer's Iliad, the 
Odyssey, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 
the sacred books of India, or of the writ- 
ings of Shakespeare, the object is every- 
where the same and the methods largely 
the same. 

The history of biblical criticism is a 
little vague in detail, but it has been 
sufficiently pronounced in all the ages to 
enable us to trace it in its various move- 
ments. Moses apprehended the presence 
and work of critics when to Jehovah, who 
had commissioned him to lead Israel out 
of Egypt, he made a plea for instruction as 
to how he should answer these questions 
that he well knew they would and must 
ask: "Who sent you? What is his name? 
What is your authority?" All the ages 
157 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 



since similar questions have greeted every 
religious teacher, document, and institu- 
tion, and a satisfactory accounting is de- 
manded. This restless age has been asking 
them with renewed energy, not from a 
captious spirit, but to gain full and satisfy- 
ing information. When men ask for bread 
of instruction they will not be put off with 
a stone of dogmatism or assumed ecclesias- 
tical authority. The last centuries of He- 
brew history and every age of Christian 
history have furnished a certain amount of 
critical output, but the nineteenth century 
has witnessed a revival of interest, thor- 
oughness, scientific method, and careful col- 
lection and consideration of facts that make 
it seem like a new science. It has indeed 
taken on a new intensity of life, breadth 
of purpose, and fullness of equipment. 

Modern scholarship is very exacting in 
demanding adequate credentials on which 
to rest its faith. If a document, sacred or 
secular, claims a certain authorship; if in- 
stitutions, religious or civil, claim antiquity 
of origin, modern scholarship will carefully 
examine the facts, test the witnesses as to 
their competency, sincerity, and disinter- 
158 



AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 

estedness, and will come to its conclusions 
only after patient and careful consideration 
of all the facts. Light and frivolous minds 
with poor equipment rush to conclusions 
and proclaim from the housetops immature 
deductions that have never been tested and 
proven by the deeper religious conscious- 
ness of the great body of believers. The 
best scholarship is reverent and hesitant to 
move into new fields and will advance only 
as compelled by the facts. Only the half- 
instructed or the overtrained specialist is 
willing to rush before the public with 
propositions that have not passed the sol- 
emn test of the Christian consciousness of 
the age. The best minds are cautious and 
considerate of the dangers involved in dis- 
turbing common beliefs in the field of 
religion, and they proceed with great care 
and deference to established beliefs. 

Yet modern scholarship must be first 
and always loyal to fact, and it must be 
perfectly free in that loyalty, or its investi- 
gations will have no value. Whether the 
facts are for or against our cherished be- 
liefs, they must stand, and the loyal in- 
vestigator must stand with them and for 
159 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 






them. An investigation undertaken with 
the result at which it must arrive deter- 
mined beforehand is worthless, for the con- 
clusion was reached before the evidence 
was heard. Hostility to a document or in- 
stitution can easily find arguments against 
it; the moral magnet has great power to 
sway the needle of the mind. An investi- 
gation undertaken with a mental bias is 
pretty sure to find for the bias. If one 
starts out with a fixed disbelief in the 
supernatural, if he rules that out as un- 
scientific and unthinkable, he is utterly 
disqualified as a critic of the Holy Scrip- 
tures, for he has already decided the 
fundamental point on which the whole dis- 
cussion turns. He must exclude miracles, 
predictive prophecy, virgin birth, resurrec- 
tion, inspiration, and everything essential 
to the life and being of Christianity. We 
do not say that he must believe these 
things, but that he must admit and feel 
that they are possible, else his conclusion 
is reached before he begins his investiga- 
tion, and therefore it is worthless. This 
narrows the field of competent critics, but 
it is necessary for the integrity of the in- 
160 



AMENABLE TO CRITICISM 

tellectual process. The specialist, doctrin- 
naire, or special pleader cannot be admitted 
here. The mind must be open as the day 
for the light to stream in from the east, 
from the zenith, or from the west. 



161 



CHAPTER XII 
THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

It is important to bear in mind that 
while criticism is a legitimate exercise of 
the intelligence to which the natural forces 
of the mind impel us, it is surrounded with 
certain limitations that bound the field of 
its action and affect the value of its deduc- 
tions. It is not an exact science, and its 
achievements must be sifted and carefully 
weighed to ascertain their true value. 

Much of the literary criticism of the Old 
Testament is vague, indeterminate, and un- 
satisfying. The canons of literary criticism 
are sufficiently accurate and reliable in 
themselves, for they are the product of care- 
ful, scholarly thinking. But their applica- 
tion to an individual case, as to the Bible, is 
subject to the infelicities of a possible faulty 
diagnosis. The remedy is good where the 
conditions for which it is appropriate exist; 
where such conditions do not exist it may 
prove deadly poison. When one comes to 
sit in judgment he may be influenced by 
162 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

prepossessions, prejudice, partial knowl- 
edge, eagerness for some worthy intellectual 
achievement, or want of a broad outlook, 
and so produce work that will be of little 
value. 

The critical theory about the names of 
Deity in use in the Pentateuch by which 
the books, chapters, and even verses are 
split up and divided among a number of 
supposed authors has been rather roughly 
handled in the court of reason and has not 
stood the test of the best modern thinking. 
The finest classical writers in Greek and 
Roman literature use a great variety of 
names and qualifying terms in speaking of 
their deities, of Zeus, Jupiter, Venus, and 
others, yet no one ever thought of splitting 
up their literature into shreds and parceling 
it out among a great number of authors 
according to their mythological terminol- 
ogy. In the New Testament and early 
Christian writings, for variety of expres- 
sion, literary enrichment, to express par- 
ticular shades of thought, the writers used 
a great variety of names, qualifying terms, 
and combinations of words to express their 
thought of Deity, as "Jehovah," "God," 
163 



THE MAKING OP THE BIBLE 

"Lord/ 5 "God and Father," "Lord God 
Almighty," and many other terms. In 
speaking of Christ the same freedom and 
variety in the use of terms appears. He is 
called "Jesus," "Jesus Christ," "The Lord 
Jesus Christ," "Son of God," "Son of 
man," "Son of the Father," "Lamb of 
God," "Alpha and Omega," "The Bright 
and Morning Star"; and a great number 
of other titles indicate the variety of 
thought with which the sacred writers ex- 
pressed themselves concerning the Divine 
Being. It would be just as scientific and 
reasonable to divide up the writings of 
Saint Paul or Saint John among a number 
of supposed unknown authors as to take 
such liberties with the Pentateuch as some 
critics have. 

It is pedantic and wholly without suffi- 
cient reason to attach so much importance 
to the use of particular names of the 
Divine Being in early Hebrew literature, 
especially as we know so little about the 
meaning, derivation, and use of the names 
employed. The name El is the most 
primitive and the most widely distributed 
of all the names of Deity and it appears 
164 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

in many combinations, as well as singly, 
in all the Hebrew writings. It was used in 
Babylonian, Aramaean, Phoenician, Hebrew, 
and Arabic; it belongs to primitive Semitic 
speech before it became modified into dia- 
lects, but of its origin, derivation, and 
meaning nothing is known. Following this 
apparently in the order of time and of 
development wa, the name "Elohim." It 
is also a general name among the nations 
for Deity, applied in Hebrew literature to 
the true God, but without any definite 
meaning that is known to us. Then came 
the name "Jehovah," which also seems to 
have been a very ancient name for Deity, 
to which special meaning and preference 
were given in the interview with Moses at 
the burning bush. We do not know its 
derivation or meaning, nor do we know 
its true pronunciation, for the vowel point- 
ings that determine the pronunciation were 
not employed till the sixteenth century of 
our era. Knowing so little about these 
names, as we do, all of which seem to have 
been used promiscuously among the na- 
tions, it seems an absurd and unscholarly 
thing to attempt to break up the Penta- 
165 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

teuch into fragments and trace them to 
their original sources by the particular 
name of Deity which they use. 

Neither is there any warrant in reason 
or in the known habits of writers for the 
arbitrary breaking up of a single book into 
a number of parts and distributing them 
among different authors on the ground of 
apparent differences in ^tyle. It is not 
according to the known facts of literary 
composition that an author always main- 
tains the same, or even a similar style. In 
all literatures the best writers are like the 
birds in their flight, sometimes high and 
sometimes low, sometimes slow and some- 
times swift, sometimes straightforward and 
sometimes circular in their movements, 
sometimes long upon the same course and 
again often doubling upon their track, but 
always the same bird. A writer of real 
ability will use different styles according to 
the subject he is treating, whether it be 
grave or gay, scientific or historical, philo- 
sophical or poetical, devotional or doc- 
trinal. The style must be suited to the 
subject and may be largely affected by the 
mood the author is in at the time of writ- 
166 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

ing. An author may write at one time in 
a style very different from what he has 
used at another time when there is no 
apparent reason for it. A writer may hold 
a production long under consideration and 
after years of thought introduce new mat- 
ter in a style quite unlike some other parts 
of the same writing. Goethe was forty 
years finishing Faust, and a recent Ger- 
man scholar says he can analyze that great 
production and distribute its parts among 
different authors on the ground of differ- 
ence in style after the manner of the higher 
critics. Every competent thinker who is 
acquainted with the details of literary 
composition must see the fatal narrowness, 
insufficiency, and unreliability of much of 
this literary criticism of the Bible. 

Even the uneducated must see that the 
presumptuous critic is outclassed, left be- 
hind, and hopelessly befogged by his own 
incompetency for his task when he comes 
to taking such liberties with the greatest 
literature. A writer may be moved by a 
great sense of moral responsibility, he may 
be fully persuaded that God is putting 
thoughts into his mind to be expressed by 
167 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

him, he may fall into a judicial mood for 
historic accuracy and fairness; again his 
mind may burn and flash with poetic fires, 
then fountains of emotion may fling their 
spray into the air, or deep resentment and 
fierce passion may break forth in lightning 
flashes and thunder peals that will shake 
the earth, or he may breathe out a spirit of 
love that would cement into one great 
brotherhood all the families of the earth. 
The critic approaches a piece of work like 
this, the output of a great mind led through 
a variety of moods and experiences in the 
course of its preparation. He sits down to 
his work cool and impassive as becomes a 
critic. He finds a strange medley before 
him, thoughts and forms of expression that 
do not harmonize, that jar one upon the 
other, that are clearly the product of dif- 
ferent mental states, and as he concludes, 
therefore, of different minds. Things are 
viewed from different standpoints, with 
feelings, moods, and tempers very unlike, 
therefore he concludes there must have 
been different persons engaged in the com- 
position. He takes up his thin blade of 
literary criticism — it is sometimes very thin 
168 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

— and he easily inserts it between the 
various parts, and lo! the structure falls 
at once into as many parts as the operator 
listeth. 

This kind of literary criticism is not 
limited to the Bible. The great poem of 
the incomparable Greek bard, the father of 
poetry, blind Homer, has been the prey of 
these rash critics that are now trying to 
tear the Bible into fragments. The im- 
mortal Iliad has been broken into a hun- 
dred fragments and the pieces handed 
around to different authors in all the cities 
of Greece who are supposed to have fur- 
nished them to some master mind who 
welded them into one great masterpiece 
of poetic beauty. For two thousand years 
the critics have been fighting again the 
old Homeric battles, flinging their clouds 
of dust and smoke into the air till one can 
only guess where the real facts are, with 
this difference, however, that there is a 
copious shedding of cold ink instead of hot 
blood. The world still holds to its faith in 
the unity of the authorship of the Iliad in 
the brain of the grand old bard whose 
name it bears. 

169 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

We are all familiar with the efforts of 
the literary critics to deny the great mas- 
ter of English literature, William Shake- 
speare, the authorship of the works at- 
tributed to him. The ease with which a 
skillful critic can use any literature, as the 
critics have used biblical literature, is illus- 
trated in this attempt to show that Lord 
Bacon was the real author of the works of 
William Shakespeare. The plausible na- 
ture of the argument in this case should 
be a sufficient indication of the danger of 
error in attempting to decide such grave 
matters by such an insufficient method. A 
strong argument has been made to show 
that Thomas Paine, and not Thomas Jef- 
ferson, was the real author of the declara- 
tion of American independence. And now 
Professor Mueller, of Germany, in a recent 
book declares that he can do with Goethe's 
Faust just what the Old Testament critics 
have been attempting with its writings. 
There is no literature that may not be 
treated in the same way, and this fact is 
sufficient to discredit and eliminate the 
method as a conclusive authority. It may 
be highly suggestive and stimulating to 
170 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

thought, but as a guide and teacher it is 
untrustworthy. The method is inadequate 
to the task it undertakes, and therefore its 
issue is unreliable. Insufficiency of method 
is, therefore, a serious limitation on the 
literary criticism of the Bible. 

A second limitation on criticism in gen- 
eral is that its results are inconclusive. 
This is for the sufficient reason that we 
are never sure that the facts are all in, and 
the facts that seem well assured to-day 
may be overturned to-morrow by some 
new discovery. The spade is in the ground 
and the mind waits on the spade; facts 
spring out of the earth, as plants do, and 
bear fruit for the feeding of the nations. 
The field of discovery has only been 
touched by the enterprise of modern 
scholars, and vast treasures lie buried in 
the ruins of ancient cities to be brought 
forth at some future time for our instruc- 
tion. Anyone who has wandered over the 
sands of Gizeh and Sakkara, along the 
Nile, or over the earth-covered ruins in 
Palestine, will be convinced that we are 
not yet ready for a final judgment on 
many of these questions of criticism. Sir 
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THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

William M. Ramsay recently said: "Tell 
them to have no fears for the future of the 
Bible. The spade is at work, and as it 
digs, it reveals, more and more, records 
that confirm the biblical narratives." 

The critics of to-day are laughing at 
those of ten years ago, and those of the 
next generation will probably look back 
with much sympathy for their poor, de- 
luded brethren of the present. Within the 
memory of this generation learned men 
were teaching that Moses could not have 
written the books ascribed to him, for the 
sufficient reason that the art of writing 
was then unknown. The argument seemed 
conclusive till the tablets of Tel-el-Amarna 
in Egypt were discovered; then there was 
much hurrying to and fro among the 
learned faculties to get into line with 
established facts and to save as much of 
the old baggage as possible. Poor Bel- 
shazzar was beaten and cuffed by these 
merciless critics till it was a real comfort to 
believe that, after all, he never had any 
real existence; but suddenly he rises out of 
obscurity, marches into the field and deals 
these critics a blow that satisfies all his 
172 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

claims against them. As for the mythical 
Sargon, nothing but laughter and ridicule 
was a sufficient expression of learned ab- 
horrence of such ignorance and credulity as 
dared to name him — just who is laughing 
now everybody knows. And these doughty 
old Hittites, so hard to subdue while living, 
but relegated to the realms of myth by 
the critics, have come marching back onto 
the field with flying banners and have put 
to flight the last man that dared to ques- 
tion the records concerning them. In so 
many things the conclusions of the higher 
critics have been proven worthless that the 
wisest of them are becoming quite modest 
in their assumptions, and one must look to 
the half-educated and the immature for 
dogmatism on the subject. This is saying 
nothing against the validity or value of 
the study or of the method, but it does 
suggest a necessary limit that commends 
the wisdom of holding conclusions in a 
tentative way. To-morrow's shovelful of 
earth or pickax stroke may shatter the 
conc'isions held for a thousand years. 

Another limitation is upon the use to be 
made of the results of criticism. A due 
173 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

sense of the uncertainty of the conclusions 
arrived at ought to make one modest about 
proclaiming them, and the possible injury 
to others who cannot accept these con- 
clusions without injury to their faith should 
lead to great caution in announcing them. 
Poisons may be so administered by a wise 
physician as to be curative, but he is liable 
to arrest as a murderer who distributes 
them indiscriminately without proper label. 
The supreme end in teaching is health of 
soul, spiritual growth and development, 
and everything must be subordinated to 
that end. In the great school of learned 
Hebrew critics that flourished from the 
eighth century before Christ, this duty of 
reticence about the results of their study 
before the common people was a cardinal 
principle, according to Professor Duff's re- 
cent history of Old Testament criticism. 

It is of the nature of malfeasance in 
office for one to accept the teaching func- 
tion in pulpit, press, or school and use the 
position to teach doctrines contrary to 
those of the church employing him. It is 
fallacious to plead the rights of scholarship 
and free speech. These rights were in full 
174 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

force and recognition when the engagement 
was entered into and when the agreement 
was made to serve the church and teach 
its doctrines; that agreement voluntarily 
limits and sets bounds to these rights. To 
depart from such an engagement and con- 
tinue receiving the salary paid for main- 
taining it is ethically unthinkable in a 
man laying claim to intellectual and moral 
integrity. It is sophistical, if not worse, 
to plead the rights of free speech in de- 
fense of unfaithfulness to the function or 
engagement of a teacher. To make such 
use of one's knowledge as to confuse, dis- 
turb, or injure the ignorant or the young 
and immature is such an abuse of the 
sacred office of teacher as to justify sum- 
mary expulsion from it. One of the first 
considerations with a sincere teacher in 
pulpit, press, or school must always be 
how to impart knowledge so that it will 
be correctly understood, and so that it will 
minister to growth of faith and strength of 
character. 

The Pauline principle is the only sane 
and safe one for teachers, and it does not 
require divine inspiration or apostolic moral 
175 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

elevation to see its justness. In writing to 
the Corinthians the great apostle said: "I 
have fed you with milk, and not with meat; 
for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, 
neither yet now are ye able to bear it." 
This is the true principle of adaptation of 
teaching to the mental and moral condi- 
tion of those to be taught, involving the 
holding back on the part of the teacher of 
much that he knew but which those under 
his instruction were not yet prepared to 
receive. A teacher of mathematics who 
should attempt to teach the Calculus to 
children in the grammar school would be 
thought to be mentally unbalanced, or so 
deficient in ideas of method as to unfit 
him for his work. It is hardly possible to 
conceive of a more reprehensible character 
than that of a religious teacher who vaunts 
himself, and feeds his vanity with the ap- 
plause he receives from the ignorant masses 
for great learning, while destroying the very 
principle of faith by injecting doubts about 
things that had been accepted as matters 
of divine revelation. 

Insistence upon this caution in teaching 
as a necessary limitation upon the student 
176 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

of criticism does not place any restraint on 
the prosecution of such studies, but, rather, 
upon their abuse. In the pulpits, press, 
and schools of the church immense damage 
has been done by the reckless and indis- 
criminate use made of the tentative results 
of critical studies, and none see more clearly 
the unwisdom of such a course than the 
great masters of these studies. 

If limited to their proper field, these 
studies do not touch the vital and essential 
contents of a book; they deal only with the 
question of authorship, date, and circum- 
stances of origin. If men have changed or 
shifted the names and dates in God's book, 
that cannot change its eternal truth; its 
spiritual light will shine on just the same, 
for the foundation of God's truth stands 
forever sure. Inspiration is a living, per- 
petual thing, and the most criticism can 
do is to shift the scenes of the great drama 
that is forever bringing light and truth 
to the minds of men. It remains true 
now as when first spoken, "My sheep 
know my voice." The devout soul quickly 
detects the notes of divine inspiration by 
a spiritual sense that distinguishes the 
177 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

quality of the tones that fall upon the 
ear. 

Critical studies are often objected to be- 
cause of their supposed findings, but a 
more valid objection is their comparative 
inutility and the habit of doubting and 
questioning which they cultivate. The 
habit of rationalizing on all things is un- 
favorable to, if not positively disabling for 
constructive or creative effort. It proposes 
the study of what has been done, rather 
than creative or constructive doing; and it 
is even concerned more with the machin- 
ery of what has been done than with the 
substance of the doing. It is objectionable 
as a mental attitude and form of effort. 

In the development of normal intel- 
lectual life there are three distinct stages 
or forms of activity. First, the ideal, in 
which the mind is reaching after truth, 
convictions, principles, and visions for its 
own interior well-being and to fit it for 
worthy action. Second, the productive 
stage, when the mind pours forth speech, 
song, artistic creations, poetry, philosophy, 
patriotism, religion, or any form of self- 
expression to which taste or talent may 
178 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

lead. Then follows the administrative form 
of effort, when the mind seeks to organize 
and operate the truths and principles ac- 
cepted; governments are formed, policies 
adopted, agencies and instruments em- 
ployed, and great causes are pushed for- 
ward with a strong hand. Thus far the 
action of the mind has been normal and 
healthy, working toward the achievement 
of worthy ends. But another form of in- 
tellectual activity may arise, not in logical 
sequence or further development, but as 
an unproductive return upon these pro- 
cesses of development for the critical study 
of the exterior formal facts concerning 
them. The constructive and productive 
gives place to the critical, and no one can 
doubt the effects of that change of mental 
attitude. This form of activity is logically 
subsequent to the others and structurally 
incompatible with them. I do not say it 
is hostile to them, but by the limitations 
of the human mind, its inability to carry 
on many lines of effort at the same time, 
the one naturally excludes the other. As 
matter of fact, few minds are broad enough 
to be productive and critical at the same 
179 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

time. The dramatic critic is never the 
great actor. The military critic is never 
the winner of battles. The art critic is 
never the master painter or sculptor. The 
literary critic is never the poet or literary 
artist. The biblical critic is seldom the 
great preacher or evangelist. The pro- 
ductive and the critical attitude are so 
different that both -do not exist in the 
same mind without mutual loss and dis- 
ablement unless you have a mind of 
unusual endowments. This question of 
mental attitude is fundamental in this, as 
in other realms of thought and action. 
What will you do? Will you carry the 
building up story by story, filling the 
rooms with things useful and ornamental 
till it stands a completed palace of utility 
and beauty? Or will you occupy yourself 
in digging down to inspect the founda- 
tions, inquiring who the first architect and 
builder were, and whether there may not 
be some confusion about their names and 
the date of their beginnings? You may 
do one or the other; you will not do both. 
This is the limitation of critical studies 
which I am pointing out, a limitation on 
180 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

intellectual productivity and efficiency; not 
upon intellectual ability, but upon that 
employment of it that renders greatest 
credit to the student and largest benefits 
to others. It is practically impossible for 
the mind to be intent upon productive 
work for the moral and spiritual regenera- 
tion of men, or for the administrative ad- 
vancement of the kingdom of Christ in 
the earth, and at the same time do thorough 
and reliable work in criticism; the two 
mental states do not exist at the same 
time in the ordinary human mind. One 
may keep himself thoroughly informed 
about the progress of critical thought with- 
out taking the critical attitude or becom- 
ing dogmatic about it. 

If one looks at the world from the 
humanitarian standpoint only, how little 
time or disposition will he find left for 
critical studies! How can he sit down to 
study an old foundation with a hungry 
child tugging at his sleeve, asking for some- 
thing to eat? With the world's vast, 
blistering, killing curse of intemperance 
spreading ever wider its "valley of dry 
bones," with its illiteracy forever jabbering 
181 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

in his ears, with childhood and womanhood, 
wronged and corrupted in all the earth, 
still lifting up their wail, and with the 
poor old world reeling on like a drunken 
man it knows not whither, how can any 
normal man devote himself to critical stud- 
ies or feel an absorbing interest in them, 
unless he is set apart to such scholastic 
pursuits? The man who in a railway 
wreck would turn aside to study the 
mechanical structure of the steam engine, 
a very useful study, while wounded men 
and women were calling for help, would be 
considered a monster of callous feeling, de- 
ficient in all the nobler and better qualities 
of human nature. The work of saving and 
reconstructing humanity has not yet ad- 
vanced far enough to justify calling off 
any considerable contingent of our forces 
to study critically the men and measures 
employed at its inception. The humani- 
tarian appeal continues to be bewildering 
in its vastness and force, and there is only 
one thinkable response for men of the 
better nature to make, and that is in the 
direction of immediate and continuous re- 
lief. Think of Martin Luther, John Wes- 
182 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

ley, John Howard, Lord Shaftesbury, or 
Florence Nightingale turning a deaf ear to 
the cry of the world to devote themselves 
to critical studies! That would have been 
another fall of angels almost as mysterious 
and disconcerting as the first, though it is 
granted that they did do some creditable 
critical work. It is one of the criticisms 
made upon the highly educated and intel- 
lectual Germans, that they neglected the 
vital and saving elements of Bible-teaching, 
and employed their great abilities in criti- 
cal studies instead of pressing home upon 
the people those spiritual truths of the 
Word of God that would have made them 
the most spiritual as well as the best edu- 
cated people in the world. It is a question 
of which shall predominate, which shall 
occupy our strength, moral and spiritual 
ends or critical studies? Any competent 
thinker can see that the moral and spiritual 
presents an infinitely better field for the 
development and display of real intellectual 
power, while the practical results are in- 
comparably greater. While the call of the 
world remains what it now is, the most 
gifted and noble natures will continue to 
183 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

respond as they have in the past. Absolute 
abandonment to the work of setting the 
world right may admit of a sideplay of 
the intellect in the pursuit of critical 
studies, but they never can acquire great 
prominence in the thought or life of such 
a man. We thus find a moral limitation, 
not a prohibition of the studies we are 
considering. 

If we look at the subject from the stand- 
point of theology, a correlated subject, we 
discover another limitation to critical stud- 
ies. We do not say a prohibition, but a 
limitation, a natural barrier. Theology, 
because of the dignity of the subject, the 
greatness of the themes, and the intel- 
lectual ability required in dealing with 
them, is "the queen of the sciences," the 
greatest of them all. The creation and 
production of theological thought is the 
highest exercise of the human intellect, the 
most taxing, absorbing, and capable of 
raising the mind to the highest enthusiasm 
and concentration of creative energy. The 
theological thinker is the embodiment of 
creative and constructive energy — a state 
of mind directly opposite to that occupied 
184 






THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

by the critic, who reviews, estimates, and 
construes what others have produced. 

It is important here to observe the dis- 
tinction between the theological thinker 
and the theological scholar. The theologi- 
cal scholar is supposed to have a com- 
prehensive knowledge of what other men 
have thought and taught in the realm of 
theology, and of the material which they 
brought to their support, while he may 
not in any true sense be a producer of 
theological thought. Such a mind, occu- 
pied with reviewing and estimating the 
productions of other minds, may find 
nothing in critical studies incongruous with 
its ordinary studies or habits of thought. 
They do not lie in the same field, but they 
face the same way toward religious life and 
literature, and their movement in the field 
of discussion is similar. The theological 
thinker glows, flames, and soars through 
vast fields of thought with an exhilaration 
and uplift of soul that renders him im- 
patient with the dry details of critical 
studies, and ill disposed toward them. The 
theologian has not a very high opinion of 
the critic's work, nor is the critic over- 
185 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

burdened with admiration for theological 
thinking. They feel with reference to each 
other's achievements about as mathema- 
ticians and poets do toward each other: 
their realms are so unlike one cannot ap- 
preciate the other. The mind will not be 
theological and critical at the same time. 
Theology opens the greatest of all fields to 
the mind of man, and whatever impinges 
upon it must give way. 

Another limitation to the work of the 
critic appears when we come to consider 
the great practical features of religious 
truth. The exercise and development of 
faith requires as much thought and care, 
and intellectual activity of as high an 
order, as critical studies require, though of 
a different kind, and it has been known to 
produce much more beneficent and lasting 
fruit. The faith life is not the blind, ir- 
rational thing, the creature of impulse, 
emotion, and reckless thinking, which many 
seem to think it to be. It is closely logical 
and methodical in its procedure, and truly 
courageous in its action, for when it has 
posited an omnipotent Helper it is thor- 
oughly rational to trust for anything, and 
186 



THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

there is warrant for undaunted courage in 
any situation. It is not walking by feel- 
ing, impulse, or vision, but on the beaten 
highway of irrefutable logic. It rears 
structures, projects campaigns, wins vic- 
tories, and claims kingdoms, giving little 
thought to origins and dates when once 
convinced that "the foundation of God 
standeth sure." It has been the con- 
quering and creative force of Christian 
history, not questioning how or why, but 
going on with confidence and courage to 
do the Lord's will as led by him. It does 
not rest in technicalities, but in the living 
verities of God's manifestation to men. 

Love is also one of those qualities of the 
Spirit that mounts, and soars, and sings, 
and serves, and overcomes out of the vital 
energies of its own nature drawn from the 
hidden sources of life, forever renewing and 
pluming itself with a sublime indifference 
to all the questions that occupy the critics. 
The great fountain of life lies open and is 
forever flowing, and true souls receive di- 
rectly from it the satisfying elements of 
the better life; and if it must sometimes 
flow through artificially constructed pipes 
187 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

of divine-human revelation, the water is so 
refreshing and satisfying that there is little 
disposition to quibble about the piping. 
What concord can a love-filled soul, sing- 
ing its glad song of praise to the great God 
whom it knows, have with a carping, pes- 
simistic critic who has lost his way groping 
through realms of darkness where there is 
no well assured path? It does not need to 
have origins accounted for; it derives life 
directly from God, with whom it is in a 
holy alliance forever, and its one business 
is to glorify the Maker of all and to lift up 
and save men by the forces of truth and 
grace that are now coming into the world. 
This is a realm of life above and beyond 
the reach of the critic, on which his shadow 
never falls; and if he sometimes sneers at 
it, he knows that it looks down on him 
with pity. The eagle, as it soars away to- 
ward the sun, is perfectly willing for the 
hop-toad to boast itself in its power of 
leaping if it can find comfort in that. 
This I say in all seriousness, for the hop- 
toad is as legitimate as the eagle, and his 
pride of leaping is as rational in the pres- 
ence of the eagle as the self-vaunting of 
188 






THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

the critic over his achievements in the 
presence of that great, shining company of 
conquering souls who are making the king- 
dom of God come by their heroic toil and 
overcoming faith. Who can define or ex- 
pound that soul-hunger that went abroad 
seeking to save men in the great revival 
periods of the church's history? It was 
wholly apart from and inconsistent with 
the critical spirit that seems more anxious 
to interpret than to repeat the conquering 
epochs of Christian history. The critical 
spirit never did, nor can it do, these 
"mighty works" of the kingdom of God, 
by which men are regenerated and savage 
tribes transformed into civilized nations. 
The fervors of worship, the evangelizing 
impulse, and the missionary spirit naturally 
flow from love and occupy all the energies. 
The greatness of the subjective benefits of 
such a life in growth of intellect and per- 
sonal power justifies the concentration of 
all the powers on it, and the beneficent 
effects of it upon others demand it of us 
as an imperative duty. The love-life and 
service will require more effort, inde- 
pendent thinking, heroism, and strength 
189 



THE MAKING OF THE BIBLE 

of character, but for this reason and 
others its returns in the higher realms of 
life are richer than all that critical studies 
can give. It is an easy life to sit down and 
criticize the works of others; it is a heroic 
life to fight battles, effect changes, and 
found institutions that will affect com- 
ing generations. Criticism presupposes 
achievements, lives by those that are not 
its own, and requires not the active but 
the reflective attitude. 

The thought I have endeavored to ex- 
press in this chapter is that the professional 
scholar is bound by his calling to pursue 
critical studies to their limit, and that the 
intelligent pastor and Christian worker 
must keep himself informed as to the 
results of the best scholarly investigation, 
but the preacher or the productive or con- 
structive thinker who turns aside to do the 
scholar's work, or who gives voice to hasty 
conclusions or undemonstrated prop- 
ositions of critics, is disabling himself and 
putting his best work in peril. If these 
"limitations" seem like the prohibition of 
criticism itself, they are not so in fact. 
The full circle of truth on any subject will 
190 






THE LIMITATIONS OF CRITICISM 

have two segments looking in opposite di- 
rections, tlie one seeming to contradict the 
other, as is the case with "free will" in man 
and "divine sovereignty" in God, each of 
which at first thought seems to exclude 
the other. Think far enough to complete 
the circle of truth, and the different parts 
w T ill be found consistent with each other. 



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